Taiwan is one country I have absolutely no problem selling weapons to. They need as big a stick as they can get to maintain independence from China.

Quantity isn’t everything

That right there hits the nail on the head. There is a certain critical mass, an activity level that makes satisfy most discussion needs for most users. It’s a tiny fraction of the total traffic of a place like Reddit or Twitter.
But if we have that, and keep the quality level up, we can succeed.

Success to me doesn’t mean killing Reddit and Twitter. It means creating a place where smart people can come and find enough content and discussion that they don’t need Reddit and Twitter.

My 2c-
It is well understood that China and USA need each other. And that has generally been seen as a desirable situation, if only to prevent the two of us from needlessly going to war over some stupid nonsense.
US has basically outsourced all manufacturing to China, to the point that it would take a decade or more to undo that. We depend on them, they depend on us too.

Most of this is just boilerplate recognition and encouragement of that fact. Stating in a great many words that China wants to continue to be a US ally. But it is also a warning, that China is not a third world nation that the US can boss around as it sees fit. So China is warning us to follow through on our word and generally be honest and do what we say.

The red line things are the real meat of that. This is an instruction / warning to Donald Trump and his incoming team. So the whole message basically says we will work with you and be friends but don’t fuck with us on these four issues.

Unfortunately, those are kind of four issues that we really should fuck with them on. USA should not turn a blind eye to human rights violations of any ally, regardless of our level of dependence on them.

And US should absolutely not support China taking over Taiwan. Not just for reasons of principle, but for our own ends- Taiwan produces an awful lot of the world’s computer chips. If China gains control of TSMC, that essentially puts them in control of the US economy because if TSMC stops sending us chips, the vast majority of the supply from Qualcomm, AMD, Apple, and others just goes away.

Our strategy so far has been to officially acknowledge the ‘One China’ policy that includes Taiwan as part of China, while simultaneously taking actions to help Taiwan stay independent. China is calling us out for that here.

If she was actually using that message, which I never heard, no wonder she lost. People don’t want the absence of something, they want radical change. They want a country that works for the middle class rather than just for the 1%. That’s why Obama’s message resonated. And that’s why Trump’s message resonates. He at least acknowledges that shit’s broken and he promises to fix it. He may be the wrong person to fix it and he may have no interest in fixing it, but his message at least acknowledges that there is a serious problem.

Harris had some policies, but not a real underlying message. She could have made a message like ‘bring back the American dream’ and that might have gotten her a win. Obama’s message was ‘yes we can’. Trump’s message is ‘make America great again’. You need a theme message like that, if you only talk positions you get lost in the noise of our shitty media.

I. Do. Not. Care. About. The. Tech.

Exactly. The tech doesn’t matter. Tech only exists in service of the gameplay, and (introduced with HL1), the story (previous to HL1 the ‘story’ of most games was just a quick blurb on why there’s monsters and why you have to shoot them).

Gamers DGAF about new tech. Gamers wanted to be told a story. We LOVED the story.

Valve could’ve used the existing engine, built NOTHING AT ALL NEW, and just finished the story with existing assets and we’d all have been over the moon happy.

This is exactly it. A lot of people are struggling. They see less jobs, less pay, meanwhile the rich get richer. They see a system that benefits everybody except them. So Trump comes along and says he’s going to fuck up the system. That sounds pretty good. And if he can make a decent excuse that he’s been fucked by the system too, people are willing to overlook a lot.

Plus, let’s not forget Harris had very little real message. Obama had a message- hope, change, yes we can. Hillary was as status quo as you can get, and people wants to reform. Kamala’s message was basically ‘I’m not Trump’ but unfortunately that’s not good enough to get you elected. Especially not when, before Biden dropped out and she got anointed, she was polling in the single digits.

Once again, you’re looking at steak. Obviously sizzle doesn’t keep you alive. But someone desperate for meat is going to follow the smoke and fire and sizzle in the hope that there is steak at the bottom of it.

So far that solution seems to be to ignore it as a problem and continue the policies that created it. Dems are a little better on unions, but neither one is addressing the systemic problem.

Just like conservatism, the problem is what parts of it you push.

Focus on divisive issues like gun control, open immigration, and hyper inclusion of any possibly marginalized group and you push people away.

Avoid the wedge issues, and focus on things that will make everybody’s lives better, like honest government, social safety net, and good health care, and you bring everybody together.

If you look at the entire range of issues, including the ones politicians don’t often talk about, you might find that Americans generally agree on more than they disagree on. But rather than focusing on those shared agreements and trying to build a better country, both parties are focusing on wedge issues where there is strong disagreement.

And you are doing the same thing that the other Democrats are doing, focusing on the steak rather than the sizzle. If you look at the things Trump has actually done in his life, most of it is just looking out for #1. And after his first 4 years, I don’t think we need another 4. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I was not impressed by his presidency.

But that’s looking at steak. He may not have much steak, but he has an awful lot of sizzle in excess.

You have a country that is (to continue the analogy) starving and malnourished. One candidate shows you a ton of sizzle and steam and flame and makes your mouth water. The other one just keep saying that eating red meat is bad for you.

That’s why Trump won. You need to understand that for a lot of people, voting involves emotion and desperation. You see the factories you work at closing, hearing about a giant tariff on Chinese goods sounds fucking awesome. You work lower end jobs and see companies switching from full-time American workers with salary and benefits to part-time immigrant workers making minimum wage, closing the border sounds like a great idea. And that’s not because of racism, it’s because you don’t want to be competing for jobs with people who will accept minimum wage and live 10 to a flat so they can all send money back home. There is of course little or no steak behind the sizzle, Trump’s first term showed that. But to an emotional voter who is desperate…

No they aren’t, and with that attitude we will continue to repeat this mistake over and over and over.

The people want change. A lot of change. You can work 40 hours a week and barely scrape by paycheck to paycheck, and it’s been like that for years. Housing is even more unaffordable.
Nothing has changed for years.
People are angry.

Donald Trump taps into that. That is his whole message. That he is an outsider, he is not the status quo, he is the one who shakes things up. He does not listen to PR people. He says what’s on his mind. He is the closest thing to a Bulworth candidate we’ve had in quite some time.

I personally think he is a liar and a criminal, but not everybody shares that view.

What does Kamala have going for her? She is the vice president, next in line of a succession. There is no radical reform there. It is status quo. And let’s not forget that before Biden dropped out and Kamala was crowned successor, she was pulling very low even among Democrats.

The problem is not that America refuses to hand the country over to a woman. The problem is that the DNC keeps putting forward the wrong people as candidates, and expects the whole nation to vote for them simply because they’re not Republican. It doesn’t work that way.

My point is though, as long as you blame sexism or racism or whatever for Trump’s win, you hide the real problem and thus prevent it from being fixed.

It NEEDS to be fixed.
For the good of the country, we (Dems) cannot expect people to just vote for us because we’re not Republican. We need to offer them something better. Obama did that. That’s why he won. Hope, change, yes we can. That was something better. And so he defeated a real non-crazy Republican.

Whoever is the next Democratic candidate, they need to do that. Offer a real message and a real plan. Not just ‘I’m not red’.

Okay Trump is recent, but his whole change of focus since buying Twitter is where public opinion on him shifted. That started a shift in public statement more toward the libertarian or perhaps conservative and that made him unpopular with a lot of the liberals who previously liked him for pushing environmental causes.

Now that he pushes conservative and libertarian ideals, supports a Republican candidate, he becomes persona non grata. That may well be valid, but it should not take away recognition of his other accomplishments. If he’s now an asshole, he can be a visionary asshole. Becoming an asshole doesn’t mean he isn’t or wasn’t a visionary.

I’m not saying he’s not an asshole. But he is a visionary.

And right now, if he wasn’t up Trump’s ass, you’d probably be saying he’s a visionary without sarcasm.

Third party voter here. I don’t expect any third party candidate to win. My home state of Connecticut is solidly blue. All of our electoral votes WILL go to Harris, no vote of mine could change that even if I wanted it to, which I don’t. I am no fan of Trump.

I vote for whichever third party looks likely to get the most total votes, because of a third party can drum up 5% of the total national popular vote they get a lot more federal election funds in the next election.

My voting priority is for next cycle, to get a third party on the debate stage. That’s what I’m voting for.

Obviously the right of people to live is very important. But if somebody encourages them to end their own life, their right is not being taken away, they are just being given bad advice. If they choose to suicide, their right to live is being surrendered by them, by their own bad choice. Taking away somebody’s right to live is murder. Encouraging somebody to do something stupid is harmful, but it is not murder. No more is it theft if I encourage you to set your money on fire and you do it. You choose to follow my obviously bad recommendation, you choose to set your own money on fire. That is your choice and your responsibility.

Making any sort of speech illegal is a slippery slope. Most civilized people would agree they don’t want to read racist rhetoric, encouragements of suicide, etc. but when ‘I don’t want to read that’ becomes ‘I don’t want you to be allowed to say that’ you start forcing the morality of the majority on everybody. And that rarely ends up in good places, historically speaking.

Read your damn history.

SpaceX is basically 100% Elon’s creation. He was founder, Tom Mueller (who designed the Merlin rocket engine) was the first employee period

Tesla was Elon and a few other people who had seen a good electric roadster, but it had been a one-off that that company was not going to produce. They decided they wanted to produce an electric roadster, so they did. Initially, Martin Eberhard was in charge of the company and Elon was just an investor. Search archive.org for the original Tesla blog. It’s all laid out. I know this because I was following them while it was happening.

Eberhard was in charge, and they were going for a setup with a two-speed gearbox. There was to be no clutch, just a synchromesh to allow shifting. Problem is, shifting at 10,000+ RPM under heavy load is mechanically stressful, and they were having a lot of trouble getting the gearbox to work reliably. After a good year of screwing with this, they were burning through cash and not getting close to actually shipping a car. That’s when Elon stepped in, pushed Eberhard out, and took over Tesla. Elon quickly switched to a setup with a single speed non-shifting gearbox (much easier to build, much less expensive, and will basically last forever as long as you lubricate it) and a larger and better cooled electric motor to deliver the required torque that they wouldn’t get from a lower speed gear. That setup is still in use today in all Teslas.

The problem is that ideas that are under people like musk, are doomed to always fail

Like electric cars, like reusable rockets…

Half-Life. I know there’s been some successful efforts to modernize it, but those only bring it up to Source 2 era.

I would love a fully modern remake. Modern lighting and raytracing could do great things for the detail of a headcrab infected scientist.

Absolutely. Game had a great mix of large-scale, good pace of a fight, and social element.

VGW