I have yet to see it in this thread, but the WSJ reported that the "crime" they "extradited" him for is running a drug cartel and dumping tons of cocaine into the US.
I know this is what they claim (well, they also say because of oil and because he was friends with US rivals, but that's less defensible), but anyone really believe this is about drugs? Was there ever any proof Maduro was a cartel boss?
They are getting their message very confused. Is this about drugs? About the Venezuelan elections? About oil? All of the above? None of the above? Who knows anymore.
Half of life is collective "give a damn". If you see 1000 FBI agents, read 47 headlines, and hear a dozen gas station conversations then you start to tune in. That's when the tips start coming in, as everyone wants to be part of the big "thing".
But it's already like this. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have survived in tech if people knew I was a conservative. I've always felt like I would be punished if people knew.
There's a huge difference between top down cancellation and bottom up cancellation.
Do you think the CEO would have fired you for being conservative? Or do you think your career wouldn't have advanced because people wouldn't want to associate with someone who's always saying things they find abhorrent?
I think people wouldn't have wanted to work with me or listen to my opinions. I don't think the CEO would care, but down at my level, what the CEO thinks doesn't matter. It's all about peers and adjacent teams.
And I never voice any political opinions at work because I don't want to say anything my peers would perceive as "abhorrent".
>I think people wouldn't have wanted to work with me or listen to my opinions.
If I was your co-worker, I wouldn't want to know your non-work related opinions, especially your political opinions. That assumes we're not working on someone's political campaign.
Your opinions that don't relate to your job are irrelevant -- at work. And as such, why would anyone, whether they agree with you or not, want to hear you (or anyone else) pontificate about how you "Like Ike" and that his Vice President would make a much better President than that (gasp!) Catholic, rum-runner/gangster's son from Massachusetts.
Yes, I'm deliberately using examples from 65+ years ago. Because it doesn't matter what the content of those opinions are. Unless you work for the RNCC or the DNC, etc. those opinions have no value or meaning in the workplace.
I'm not afraid to express my opinions, but I choose not to do so while I'm actively on the job. That you do it out of fear is, on the one hand, unfortunate but, on the other hand, a good thing as no one really wants to hear them anyway.
Keep up the good work!
>And I never voice any political opinions at work because I don't want to say anything my peers would perceive as "abhorrent".
Good. I'm sure that, regardless of how you think your peers would perceive your opinions, they are much less interested in those opinions than they are about the quality and quantity of your work, your opinions of the work and work environment, and how you interact on a personal level with others.
I was a tech-bro type libertarian dumb ass and my coworkers (even the Pacifica listeners) did not give a fuck. They were all super kind. Celebrated when my kids were born and bought baby clothes. And I was in Santa Cruz with ultra liberal types.
Then I moved to a very red state remote. And none of my co-workers cared until I got a new boss out off Chicago who was excited to have someone on his team that lived in God's country. But for him I wasn't conservative enough (I made a joke about not wanting to use my aerospace degree to make nukes so I switched to software. Guess what he did before software? FML) and I was gone for my wrong think. And I don't think I passed his 'God's country' purity test.
I think the "gotchas" were a side effect of his true mission. If you look at all the gotcha clips for Charlie Kirk and others like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, they're not created by the official accounts, it's mostly leech accounts that grab the "best of" clips for their own click-bait benefit.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure the creators aren't sad that they have these followers but I don't think they go out looking for this.
I used to have a close Ismaili friend and saw some of the inner workings of the community. They're extremely tight knit due to historical persecution (similar to Judaism). They are very well connected and are always secretly funding schools and factories for communities in need all over the world. The charity and service are never boasted about outside the religious circle to keep eyes off of them. However, they do a fair amount of boasting internally just because they are very proud of their community.
It's not the water that is the big problem here. It is the gas turbines and the location.
They started operating the turbines without permits and they were not equipped with the pollution controls normally required under federal rules. Worse, they are in an area that already led the state in people having to get emergency treatment for breathing problems. In their first 11 months they became one of the largest polluters in an area already noted for high pollution.
They have since got a permit, and said that pollution controls will be added, but some outside monitors have found evidence that they are running more turbines than the permit allows.
Oh, and of course 90% of the people bearing the brunt of all this local pollution are poor and Black.
Isn't the pollution exaggerated? Burning natural gas or methane is considered pretty clean, and produces mostly CO2 and water, which aren't toxic pollutants or a cause of breathing problems. That's why it's used inside homes in gas stoves.
There are a couple of ways to limit this. One is to avoid having nitrogen in whatever gas you use to provide oxygen. E.g., use pure oxygen, or use atmospheric air with the nitrogen removed. There is research and testing on this, but I don't think there is much commercialization yet.
Another is to use turbines designed to operate at lower temperature so that they don't reach the temperature where nitrogen and oxygen start forming nitrogen oxides. These are widely available. They are more expensive upfront, can be more finicky to operate, may require higher quality fuel, and may have more partial combustion which can lead to more partial combustion products like formaldehyde. However they can be more efficient which can lower operating costs.
A lot of it then comes down to regulatory costs. It may be cheaper to use a normal turbine with some add on to deal with NOx or it may be cheaper to use a low NOx turbine. That of course assume you even have to care about NOx. If you don't then the normal turbine is probably cheaper.
Something like 80-90% of gas turbine power plants in the US do use the low NOx turbines. However, rented gas turbines are mostly the normal ones. That's because they are easier to operate, require minimal maintenance, and are often more rugged, which are all good things for a rental. The turbines at the xAi Memphis datacenter are rentals. I believe they are intended to be temporary while the grid is improved to provide more power.
Not sure about the answer to the original motivating point, but as a tangent, gas stoves in homes do cause breathing problems (because of non-CO2/water products). Top couple of search results:
But they were first to market. That's 90% of the work. There's a huge gap between "perfect unrealized idea" and "shit you can actually buy". Hate the man all you want, he'll go down in history as the Edison of electric vehicles, even though others will undoubtedly surpass the initial public offering technologically.
The claim was that Musk's companies will "win" though, and they aren't (aside from the irrational valuation). Maybe Space X is winning, but Tesla is a minor player in the auto market with declining revenue.
Electric cars have been sold since the 1800s (electric vehicles predate the 4-cycle internal combustion engine). Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda and Toyota all had serial production of EVs in the 1990s or earlier. The land speed record holder in 1900 was an electric vehicle. Tesla wasn't first, they were relatively late, they just got it right in a number of ways.
Self driving? Maybe, but there is a lot of argument about whether a Tesla is self driving. Based on the fact that Tesla themselves require a human driver ready to intervene, it isn't a credible claim.
Of course others were first to the technology, but you can't argue with Tesla being first to get EVs in the hands of everyday consumers. That's the market part of "first to market".
Tesla was not first to market in any way. They became so popular that they have come to define the market in many people's minds, but there were mass market electric vehicles before Tesla made them. The Nissan Leaf was available for years before the Model S. Nissan had the first lithium battery vehicles in the 1990s.
I don't know why you are trying to martyr yourself on this hill. Being first to market rarely matters, despite what tech circles believe. The iPod, iPhone, Facebook, and Tesla were all followers in their respective markets, but have since become defining products.
At this point, even if we - for some reason - accept that Tesla was first to market with the Roadster, it isn't proving to be a lasting advantage. BYD is selling more electric cars than them starting last year, a trend that has gone into hyperdrive this year as Tesla sales go negative for the 2nd year in a row while BYD continues to dominate.
I'm right there with you. I work in tech, but I don't want to fuss with tech when I'm off the clock. Like, it all annoys me and just feels like work.
When my router breaks I just buy a new one. When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered. Why is it so hard to pull a card out of your pocket? I have a rule "no new chargers" when buying stuff. If it comes with some proprietary charger I make a half-assed attempt to keep up with it but I just throw it in the trash after about 6 months and buy something with a cord.
Maybe I'm an old man, but maybe that means I know now that life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.
>> When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
Well, some people enjoy fixing old things. Even though I work in tech I don't get to fix physical devices at work, which means fixing them at home doesn't feel like work at all. Rather it feels like an excellent and fun way to save money for something more meaningful than buying a new router or laptop.
I have some passion for technology, but zero passion for wasting the little money I'm paid on expensive devices, which will be outdated in a couple of years anyway.
I guess this is very geographic dependent. I live in a country where only maybe 80% of merchants accept Visa/Mastercard (and thus only those can accept Google/Apple Pay) so I need to either carry a card for our domestic payment card infrastructure–or carry cash in order to be able to transact with any shops.
>>I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered.
How are people "fussing with unlocking their phones" to pay though? It literally couldn't be any easier - I pull it out, touch the screen on the fingerprint sensor to unlock it and tap on the terminal, done. It's about 200x easier than pulling the card out of my wallet, and the card can only be used for contactless up to a certain amount, and half the time it randomly asks me for my pin anyway so the whole benefit of contactless is lost. Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
>> When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
I mean I hope you recognize the incredible priviledge behind that statement - for a lot of people tinkering with their laptop isn't about being a hobby IT person, it's about the fact that a new laptop costs half their salary so it's quite literally not an option.
>> life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.
Sure but you make it sound like it's a chore - most people(I'd guess) set up HA because it provides value in their lives, that other, more simpler devices cannot provide. So at the cost of X number of hours once a year you get a device that consolidates all of your home automation and data. If you could buy a premade device that did it without fuss - I'm sure a lot of people would.
> How are people "fussing with unlocking their phones" to pay though? It literally couldn't be any easier - I pull it out, touch the screen on the fingerprint sensor to unlock it and tap on the terminal, done. It's about 200x easier than pulling the card out of my wallet, and the card can only be used for contactless up to a certain amount, and half the time it randomly asks me for my pin anyway so the whole benefit of contactless is lost. Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
Sweaty/wet hands can make unlocking unreliable, some people have multiple cards and need to select the correct one, sometimes their phone is lagging and taking time getting the wallet screen opening, etc. It is not uncommon to see people struggling for a few seconds with their watch or smartphone. So do people not finding their wallet in a bag too or failing to grab a card from a physical wallet too to be honest. I wouldn't say one option is 200x easier, both are pretty much on equal terms imho.
I don't use wallet because I don't have a google account on my phone anyway nor would it work with my grapheneOS AFAIK anyway.
> Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
And it only gets easier when you pay with a watch - you don't even have to pull your phone out of your pocket!
My cards only come out when I'm making a large purchase that I want extra protection on (think the UK's Section 75) and these are usually purchases I know about in advance - otherwise my wallet stays at home most days.
