COASTER1921

We're not possibly going to flip but hopefully with abortion now restricted we'll be closer to a swing state than in quite a while. The biggest problem is how heavily gerrymandered the state is, there are some crazy looking districts to get some parts of urban areas to vote red. A simple majority of votes really won't do it in the state of Texas.

Honestly the sacrifices they make are pretty reasonable for every day use too. I used ultra cheap Umidigi smartphones for four years as a student and they held up quite well with a huge upside being shockingly good repairability. The biggest downside is the rear camera usually, I wish I had better photos from those times.

You can get the Umidigi G9 5G for just $99 shipped on aliexpress. Even budget phones under $100 get 8gb RAM, 128GB storage , and 90hz displays now. There really aren't as many sacrifices as you'd expect, and by the time you spend $200 you even get plenty respectable cameras that would be flagship quality just a few years ago.

He's far too busy with X, Trump, and his relationship drama to have any time to do anything close to being involved. Of the company's he's bought or been involved in creating SpaceX is toward the bottom of his priorities from what I hear.

Not a Tesla fan and I absolutely despise the cult around Elon. SpaceX is a bit different though. Luckily with Elon's many, many side project misadventures he's pretty hands-off with SpaceX. Ultimately it comes down to being largely engineer driven and given sufficient (but yes, still government) funding to try new things without the scrutiny of direct government agencies. The hours are usually terrible from what I hear, but this varies team to team.

My biggest complaint is that they do lowball engineers using the stock as reasoning for why it's worth accepting. FWIW historically that has been the case, and many engineers there do effectively have golden handcuffs. But expecting infinite golden handcuff level growth forever is unrealistic.

At the same time those Republicans who they'd hope to gain support from by allowing to vote by mail now believe that voting by mail will lead to fraud.

Honestly early voting isn't too much of a pain. I already know I'll be out of town for work on election day but because of early voting I'll be able to get it done before then. It's silly how complicated a process they make registration and how most of the polling locations are churches, but allowing voting by mail won't fix the main issue here, registration.

Land isn't the problem, even in suburbia large commercial complexes fail all the time or rich people get some grand ambition to build their perfect city outside of the existing one. For example Las Colinas outside of Dallas. Or Rosslyn outside of Washington DC. These were planned in one go to be the ideal future of urbanism at their respective times, and there are many other examples beyond these. The issue lately if the local opposition is small or poor is zoning requirements and parking minimums drastically increasing costs.

Before you can start to change public perception it needs to be legal to build densely. Parking minimums and a variety of other commercial building code regulations make this much more expensive in the US, all while the people nearby in single family homes fight any new builds due to their poor perception of condos and apartments. Just removing the stigma is only one part of the equation.

If they really wanted to change regulations they'd push changing zoning regulations in cities to allow building anything other than detached single family housing. That would be totally reasonable and help alongside tax incentives. But I have a feeling that's not what's meant by changing regulations...

Web browsers don't integrate to a single account and payment system, nor do they preemptively load entire websites before you start browsing. So you're always waiting for actions to complete or for images to load which feels slower. Mobile websites also tend to be very bloated slowing things down further than if the same functions were done natively in an app. There's also no consistency between websites so you never know when something will/won't work nor how far away you are from checkout. And then to top it all off there's browser compatibility, which is typically pretty poor for anything that isn't Chrome/Safari.

If a web browsers could really do the same thing all these companies wouldn't feel the need to make their own device specific apps.

Even the best websites don't feel as smooth as native UI elements, and somehow browser compatibility is still a very common issue. Signing in with Google and using gpay for checkout is kind of close, but each website has different design elements complicating the experience while giving up the same amount of your personal data as if using an everything app.

And you can repair them without needing to shut down a whole railway. All these projects to put solar panels in novel places are totally pointless and solving a problem that doesn't exist.

This is why everything apps are so popular in many parts of the world. Using a mini-app from the internet running within another app is far preferable to downloading a whole app you may never need to use again. The way they do it in China is so seamless even if you've never visited the business before. There's never any special account creation or entering of payment information.

Obviously it's pretty terrible in terms of user privacy since the everything app has basically unchecked access to all of your personal information and habits, but the convenience is incredible and feels decades ahead of how apps work in the US.