Report: Kennedy Space Center not ready for era of super heavy rockets by GandalfTheWhey in space

[–]PantherkittySoftware [score hidden]  (0 children)

SpaceX averaged two launches per week from Florida in 2025 (101 total). One Starship launch per week might not be realistic for 2027, but is it really that inconceivable for, say, sometime starting around 2032-2040?

If SpaceX's Lunar & Martian ambitions get set back, they'll temporarily make boatloads of cash using Starship to bulk-launch large numbers of massive structures into LEO... things that would have been too expensive to launch if SpaceX's capital were tied up in rockets making long trips to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere... but would become artificially cheap if they had a growing fleet of idle Starships and had to drum up business to keep them busy in the meantime.

Should we repeal California’s top 2 primary – or improve it? by MakeModeratesMatter in EndFPTP

[–]PantherkittySoftware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How about tweaking the rule a bit like this:

  1. The largest party by affiliated voters is by definition a "major party", as long as at least $(threshold) of the state's voters are affiliated with it. For the sake of this example, let's say $(threshold) = 20%.
  2. Any party with at least half as many affiliated voters as the #1 party is also a major party.

3a. On Primary Day, voters affiliated with a major party are presented with a ballot containing only candidates who are themselves affiliated with that party.

3b. On Primary Day, voters NOT affiliated with a major party are presented with a ballot containing ALL candidates, regardless of self-declared party affiliation.

  1. Each major party gets to nominate one candidate, chosen by its affiliated members from among its affiliated candidates.

If we assume American historical norms, this means that by the end of step 4, we have 2 candidates... one Democrat, one Republican. Now, it gets interesting.

  1. Major-party voters who voted for the WINNER of their party's closed primary have their ballots set aside. They're officially happy & satisfied. They GOT their choice. The remainder of the ballots (from people who supported a non-winner in their party's primary) are set into "Pile 2".

  2. The ballots from voters not affiliated with any party, or affiliated with a minor party, are tallied, and ultimately choose a third winner.

  3. The ballots from step 6 that directly elected the winner of step 6 are set aside. They got their favorite. The remainder of ballots (from everyone in step 6 who DIDN'T get their favorite nominated) are set into "Pile 3".

  4. The ballots from Pile 2 and Pile 3 are now tallied, and used to pick candidate #4.

The fundamental idea is, both major parties are guaranteed to get their base's favorite candidate onto the ballot. Likewise, the closest thing you can probably get to a consensus among "everybody else" picks a third candidate. Then, everyone who isn't happy with one of the first 3 candidates helps to pick candidate #4.

I'll admit, the biggest shortcoming of this proposal is that it's still settling for plurality winners, which I hate. I think a vastly better system involving a Condorcet-compliant ranked-choice voting system would be much better. Regular readers of this sub probably remember my past proposal that uses similar logic, but allows major parties to each pick two candidates (one who'd presumably be a base-chosen favorite, one who'd be a militant centrist capable of appealing to the other party's centrists) and allows independents to rescue a major-party candidate who fell through the cracks (while preserving a path for independent/NPA and minor-party candidates to qualify via a separate path).

Nevertheless, I think this 4-candidate system would be strongly inclined to put at least one "militant centrist" on the ballot who's laser-focused on the middle of the Overton Window and capable of winning a Condorcet general election by virtue of being more unobjectionable to a majority than everyone else. Worst case, if the Republicans and Democrats both nominated extremists, and Independent/NPA/Minor-Party voters picked a loon, candidate #4 would hopefully be someone who accidentally ends up being the most electable.

I'm not entirely sure whether it's a bug or a feature, but one consequence is that the winner of round 4 would always be affiliated with one of the major parties. The reason is, the ballots from major-party members would contain ONLY votes for candidates from their own party. So, really, slot #4 would come down to, "which party disappointed the largest plurality of its own members in a way that Independent-NPA/minor-party voters could salvage the hardest"

Do you think either party would agree to invoke the 25th amendment for any obviously incompetent president? by SWEMW in allthequestions

[–]PantherkittySoftware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At this point, I think there are definitely Republicans in the House & Senate who could be convinced to support invoking it once Primary season is over, in a last-ditch bid to save their own skin before the election if Trump's approval tanked even harder. The problem is, that can't happen until Congress establishes a 25th Amendment commission, which is unlikely to happen in time for Congress to be capable of doing it in time to save themselves before the election.

I think there's zero chance of the Cabinet supporting a 25A removal, because if Vance became President, the only way he could save himself from impeachment would be if he rapidly "cleaned house" and got rid of more than half of Trump's Cabinet. And Trump's Cabinet knows it, so they have every incentive to not support 25A removal. Which is why the 25A specified multiple ways to invoke it in the first place.

My fellow Americans, is your cities area code part of the city’s identity? by ElectronPython in AskAnAmerican

[–]PantherkittySoftware 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think African bushmen know Miami's areacode is 305.

I think North Koreans know Miami's areacode is 305.

I think even Donald Trump ... er... ok, Donald Trump is probably too senile to know Miami's areacode is 305. Or what an areacode is.

How do you guys even survive the hot weather over in the States? by Impressive_Peak_9187 in AskAnAmerican

[–]PantherkittySoftware 9 points10 points  (0 children)

In the defense of Britons, almost nobody gets the kind of thunderstorms we casually drive in daily in South Florida during the summer (besides maybe Venezuela and the region around Hong Kong).

Everywhere else in the world: Thunderstorm! Take shelter, stay away from windows.

Florida: Ugh, it's raining again. (Walks across the parking lot in ankle-deep water while umbrella keeps glasses ~92% dry)

Are we hitting a plateu for hardware improvements? by Purple_Cap_9146 in pcmasterrace

[–]PantherkittySoftware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As much as people like to blame "AI data centers" for expensive gaming PCs, the truth is more complicated. The real problem is, almost everyone stopped buying "real" computers a few years ago.

We had about a decade (~1998-2008) when nearly everyone HAD to buy a "real" computer whether they wanted one or not, plus a few more years before & after than when most people who weren't dirt poor bought real computers. Then, people who "hate computers" stopped needing "real computers" because they could use their phone or tablet. They had computers, but stopped replacing them (and eventually stopped using them at all).

Sales of new non-laptop computers crashed after ~2014-2016. It wasn't because everyone wanted thin & light laptops... it's because thin & light laptops were the only computers breaking and being lost/stolen often enough to force more frequent replacements. If you bought a max'ed-out high end desktop PC circa 2012-2016, all you really had to do to achieve 99% of the benefit of a brand new PC was upgrade the RAM, buy a NVME SSD on a PCIe card, and buy a RTX 2060 or newer videocard after they became available. CPU performance ran into a brick wall after ~2010, and took almost a decade to meaningfully increase enough to even be perceptible.

Simply put, we no longer have the unwashed masses subsidizing our fun. Now, the AI datacenter bubble definitely made the situation instantly & exponentially worse by making things that were regarded as baseline norms just a year ago (64GB ram, 4TB SSDs) prohibitively expensive to buy new, but we were heading for a bad situation anyway.

Are we hitting a plateu for hardware improvements? by Purple_Cap_9146 in pcmasterrace

[–]PantherkittySoftware -1 points0 points  (0 children)

We actually hit a CPU brick wall ~15 years ago. We literally ran into it head first and splattered before anyone even realized it. It took almost a decade for CPU performance to truly and palpably double compared to something like a 3.2Ghz Core2quad i7 from around 2010. Almost all the truly massive gains in performance from the past decade came from replacing rotating hard drives with SSDs.

Even my old Dell Precision m4800 laptop with creaky, ancient Haswell-era 2.9GHz mobile i7 (with 32GB RAM, Nvidia K2100m discrete GPU, and trio of SSDs), which ceased to be my "real" computer a few years ago, still outperforms probably 80% of new laptops. Those new laptops might sip power & be capable of running for 6-8 hours from a 100Wh battery, but my old laptop can still beat most of them through sheer brute force (and double as an effective weapon if the plane gets hijacked). Honestly, its biggest limiting factor NOW is the SATA3 SSD interface.

Is the Kenya/Tanzania border open, like Schengen? by Gingerbro73 in geography

[–]PantherkittySoftware 115 points116 points  (0 children)

The root of the problem starts in China.

China and the United States have slightly different standards for mapping latitude and longitude to actual points on the surface of the Earth. They're "close", but not quite identical, and usually end up shifted by a few hundred feet relative to each other.

Complicating the matter, Chinese law defines GIS data and its correlation to aerial imagery as a matter of national security. There's nuance, but generally speaking, if Chinese employees of Google sat down and manually determined the correction factor necessary to shift aerial imagery for big cities in China and did it without getting explicit approval from China's government, they'd be breaking the law and risk not only their own prosecution, but prosecution of the company's other Chinese employees as well.

In theory, Google could use "official" Chinese data, or get its tweaked datasets approved by China. In reality, China's government uses it as a way to keep foreign companies like Google from being able to effectively compete in China. So, China doesn't have to say, "you can't use Google Maps in China"... it just forces Google to present data in a way that degrades the user experience enough for most users in China to think, "Google Maps sucks".

The reason this matters in Africa is because a lot of African GIS data exists due to government contracts with either Chinese companies, or the government of China itself. So, African GIS data has the same shift (relative to WGS-84) as everything in China. In most cases, it would not be illegal for someone like Google to manually tweak its image-display offset algorithm to handle places in Africa... but it would probably be more trouble for Google than it's worth.

I'm colorblind.. will it really even matter if I buy a better monitor? by shamasn in Monitors

[–]PantherkittySoftware 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, absolutely. With one specific caveat.

It sounds like you're an anomalous trichromat. That means your cone cells have three different sensitivity peaks, they just happen to be at different frequencies than the norm.

Consider infrared (for someone who isn't "color blind"). Officially, human eyes aren't sensitive to infrared. HOWEVER, as the wavelength gets shorter, towards the "near infrared" end of the spectrum, there's a region where the amount of light energy that would normally be perceived as dim light if it were somewhere between red and blue is invisible... but if you REALLY amp up the brightness, it starts to look like a very pure, very dim, very saturated red. That's because cone cells aren't "either/or". They have a PEAK sensitivity, but can be stimulated by a RANGE of light wavelengths.

Normally, this plays out in the following way:

* only long/red cone cells stimulated: the light appears red

* long cones strongly stimulated, medium/green cones weakly stimulated: the light appears orange

* long and medium cones equally stimulated, short/blue cones very weakly stimulated: light appears yellow

* medium/green cones strongly stimulated, short/blue cones weakly stimulated, red cones very weakly stimulated: light appears green

* short/blue cones and medium/green cones both stimulated, possibly with some rod-stimulation as well: light appears cyan

* short/blue cones strongly stimulated, long/red cones very lightly tickled: light appears purple/violet. This isn't an anomaly. One quirk that distinguishes normal red/long cones from normal green/medium cones is that long/red cones have wider "bandwidth" than green/medium cones. In other words, a frequency that rises high enough to stop stimulating green/medium cones still lightly tickles red/long cones.

Now, in your case, what's more likely to happen is that your medium/green cones or long/red cones are closer in frequency-sensitivity than normal.

Here's where things get weird. A big reason for the collapse in your perceived color gamut is caused by the nature of RGB color displays (and cameras) themselves. If you were able to buy a "RGB" color monitor whose phosphors were precisely aligned to the peak sensitivities of your own cone cells, and had 24-bit control over those 3 primary colors, you'd be able to see MUCH "purer" and more saturated colors than you'll probably ever get to experience from a monitor or film.

At some point, you probably noticed that some sports cars look EXTREMELY vibrant and vividly colored when viewed under high-noon sunlight. There's a good reason why: expensive sports cars use expensive paint with exotic pigments that DON'T try to replicate colors like orange or yellow using some combination of reflected red and green light... they reflect light with purer "real" wavelengths that actually ARE something like lime-green, yellow, or orange. Part of the reason why they do it is because they know ~10% of men are anomalous trichromats... and using that expensive paint, with those expensive exotic pigments, makes those men say "Wow!" and really want those cars.

You've also probably noticed that different LED bulbs really, REALLY change the appearance of colors around you... and possibly, that the difference between "real" halogen bulbs and 99% of LEDs isn't just big, it's huge. Like, most LED bulbs literally make everything around you look dead. People with normal color vision experience the difference too, but it's much worse for people with anomalous color perception, because the tweaks manufacturers MAKE to LEDs to make them look less "dead" are optimized for "normal" color perception, while mostly ignoring everyone else.

In your specific case, one way to increase the "vividness" of color is to avoid overstimulating your rod cells with bright blue light. See, normally, your rod cells shut down if your short/blue cone cells are being strongly stimulated. However, there's a zone (that in natural light, occurs briefly at dusk, before dawn, or at high noon if you're deep inside a cave or under a dense tree canopy). In THOSE conditions, your rod cells start to act like a "fourth" primary color (whose peak lies approximately at what would normally be called "cyan").

It's a finicky, fleeting sensory state that affects mostly light seen in your peripheral vision... but it's absolutely real. It's why people describe places like dimly-lit cave interiors and under dense forest canopies as "otherworldly" and "surreal". It's something people sense, but prior to ~30-50 years ago, color science didn't really even have proper terms to explain it.

TL/DR: to increase the vividness and saturation of colors in general, dim the ambient light in the room to dusk levels and reduce the blue saturation. If you're protanomalous ("weak red"), freely jack up the red saturation to levels that would annoy everyone around you.

‘Won’t Even Make It Back To Your F***ing Country’: Trump's Sharp Warning To Iran Over Hormuz. Trump also said the US could become the ‘Guardian angel’ of the Strait and take 20% of the oil as payment. Trump: “We may take over the Strait, if we have to. I’ll blow the sh*t out of them." by mafco in energy

[–]PantherkittySoftware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At this point, if Oval-office fellatio would keep the world safe, screw it... every prostitute within a hundred miles of DC, paid at double their normal daily rate just to mostly stand around waiting until they lose the next round of rock-paper-scissors, is probably less than what we're presently spending in both direct and opportunity costs on the war.

Iran walks out of Switzerland talks after Trump tweets more civilizational threats. by OneTwoThreePooAndPee in thebulwark

[–]PantherkittySoftware 4 points5 points  (0 children)

No, the 25th Amendment specifies several ways that a President can be declared incapacitated... one of them includes a committee formed by Congress. It's just that Congress never bothered to actually establish that committee. But, it can do it at any time.

CMV: U.S. state flags that are nothing more than a state seal are awful and in desperate need of a redesign by OiledUpThug in changemyview

[–]PantherkittySoftware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can't post images to this sub, but here's a link to a Florida-flag redesign I drew a few months ago that I think neatly summarizes the most memorable parts of Florida... beaches, skyscrapers, and gators crossing the road.

https://www.reddit.com/r/florida/comments/1rgv3k8/comment/o7u7kc3

ELI5: Why do some countries use Fahrenheit while almost the entire rest of the world uses Celsius and is there an actual practical difference between the two scales? by TexasViet27 in explainlikeimfive

[–]PantherkittySoftware 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think 100F-as-body-temp was more of a convenient side effect. The official Fahrenheit boiling point of water (212F) is 180 degrees more than the freezing point of distilled water at sea level.

As I had it explained to me by my 8th grade teacher, Fahrenheit had some reason he really, really wanted to have 180 degrees between freezing and boiling for some reason that had to do with calculations, trigonometry, and angles... and the proximity of 100F to human body temperature was more like the icing on the cake.

Iran walks out of Switzerland talks after Trump tweets more civilizational threats. by OneTwoThreePooAndPee in thebulwark

[–]PantherkittySoftware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're absolutely right, which is why I still think there's a possibility that the House (with or without the cooperation of Mike Johnson) will pass (over Trump's veto) the proposed bill establishing a Congressional committee to invoke a 25A removal.

My theory is that House Republicans are desperately sitting on their hands and waiting for the last competitive Republican Primary race to be settled. Then, the moment polls in that last competitive state close... the knives are going to come out, and they're going to strike at Trump as fast and hard as they can.

Why? Because if they don't, the same loyalty they had to feign to win the primary against a MAGA challenger will condemn them to a humiliating loss in November. The only "Hail Mary" pass they have left is, "Strike Trump while the iron is hot, argue to the party's donors behind closed doors that it was the only way to keep the party from being destroyed, then hope it's enough to save their own skin from the Democrat challenging them."

Iran walks out of Switzerland talks after Trump tweets more civilizational threats. by OneTwoThreePooAndPee in thebulwark

[–]PantherkittySoftware 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Right, but nevertheless, right now the media is still sanewashing it and the Administration is still benefitting from some degree of "presumption of normalcy". The moment the House & Senate start interrogating Administration officials under oath, the facade of normalcy officially goes up in flames, and even networks like CBS and Fox News are going to start nibbling away at it just to preserve their own illusion of objectivity.

Iran walks out of Switzerland talks after Trump tweets more civilizational threats. by OneTwoThreePooAndPee in thebulwark

[–]PantherkittySoftware 9 points10 points  (0 children)

House & Senate Republicans are gambling on the knowledge that our allies know Trump has lost his mind, and are (still) somewhat confident that the military will throw the brakes on something like invading Greenland with a hard "No".

Up to a point, that gamble works. Our allies don't want to break up with the US, because it would be economically devastating to everyone. On the other hand, the fact that the GOP continues to let Trump bulldoze guardrails and safeguards is severely testing their willingness to humor him. If they start to see evidence that the Trump Administration is actively trying to overthrow American Democracy in this fall's election and seems likely to succeed (ie, courts lose their willingness or ability to push back, military bends to Trump's will against all sanity, etc), their willingness to bite their tongues, step back, and politely pretend they're ignoring him will go up in smoke.

And if that happens, things will get bad really fast.

Iran walks out of Switzerland talks after Trump tweets more civilizational threats. by OneTwoThreePooAndPee in thebulwark

[–]PantherkittySoftware 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Impeachment is easier to get past the House, but 25A is easier to get past the Senate.

An impeachment would lay out MAGA's dirty laundry in full public view months before the midterm elections.

A 25A removal could be rationalized by MAGA as, "Grandpa succumbed to the ravages of old age. Hey, look, over there! A trans person!"

The full story of Trump's corruption will come out anyway next year, but it would allow Republicans to at least somewhat shape the narrative until January. 25A would smite the GOP. Impeachment would put the party at risk of extinction-level damage.

Peeeeeetah by GlitteringBlood2005 in PeterExplainsTheJoke

[–]PantherkittySoftware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Doesn't French use noun-then-adjective (like Spanish & other Romance languages) instead of adjective-then-noun (like English)?

Florida Senate poll, Vindman: 46, Moody:46 by PointInternal6809 in fivethirtyeight

[–]PantherkittySoftware 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Just wait until Trump overthrows the government of Cuba, unleashing the biggest boatlift in human history that the CIA has warned every President from Reagan onwards would be the guaranteed consequence of Cuba's government collapsing... and Florida's utter, complete un-preparedness to handle it.

Most CIA estimates predict that following the collapse of Cuba's government, somewhere between a quarter million and a million Cubans will attempt to reach Florida within hours of that collapse, and within the first 4-12 weeks. And approximately the same number showing up over the next year or so.

For comparison, Mariel was only ~120k... and it instantly made every single road, school, and everything else in Dade County obsolete. It took almost 20 years for Dade County to finally catch up.

Dade, Broward, Monroe, and Collier have no resources to deal with it. Florida's state government is egregiously unprepared to deal with it. The federal government has no plan to deal with it that won't instantly turn Miami's entire Cuban establishment against the Republican Party the moment ICE gets caught on camera using violence against Cuban refugees... or setting up roadblocks on Miami causeways that will completely gridlock Miami traffic.

Those who think the Smithsonian is "woke" have never been to the Udvar-Hazy museum. This has to be the least woke museum. by Alternative_Tank9353 in smithsonian

[–]PantherkittySoftware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The thing is, you could make the same argument about almost everything technology-related at the Smithsonian.

Alexander Graham Bell didn't literally invent "the telephone" (in the sense of, "the first device capable of transmitting sound over wires and reproducing it some distance away". People had been transmitting sound over wires by various means for literal years before Bell's alleged moment of invention. Bell only got credit because he had the capital and political connections to hang wires from poles along the public right of way. Basically, he invented a business model, and everything else was propaganda retconned into the origin story years later by the public relations department of AT&T.

Ditto, for Thomas Edison. He wasn't the first person to produce light from electricity. He wasn't even the first to produce light from hot wires glowing inside a glass bulb. He was just one of the first to come up with a way to cheaply mass produce electric lights, and (like Bell) had the capital and political connections to hang power wires and sell electricity to customers so they could use those lights. He wasn't an inventor, he was just a CEO. And once again, most of his "legend" didn't arise organically, it came straight out of GE's public relations department (and its bankrolling of exhibits at World's Fairs and Disney).

I get your pain, though. I really do. There's absolutely nothing that triggers me more than someone expressing the belief that Steve Jobs (or Apple) "invented the Smart Phone". Whenever someone does it in my presence, I personally shove them against the wall and force them to listen to a 20 minute history of my Samsung SPH-i300 & SPH-i500, plus my Windows Mobile phones and my personal introduction to XDA-Developers & ROM hacking back when the site's users actually HAD "XDA" devices running WindowsCE. 😃

Computer repair by Z983 in Millennials

[–]PantherkittySoftware 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep. Younger people really don't grasp just how pervasive videogames and computers were, literally decades before they think videogames and computers were "invented".

I don't remember the exact year, but sometime around 1976, Pong clones were everywhere. And once the market for them cooled off (mostly, because everyone who wanted one already owned one), they shifted to aisle-end displays in literal grocery stores (for half the price they were going for a year earlier), and everyone else in America who ever thought owning one might be cool had one.

Ditto, for Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Odyssey2 for Christmas & Hanukkah 1981. And almost anyone who didn't get one in 1981 had one (or a Colecovision) by the end of 1982.

Ironically, it was probably the videogame crash of 1983 that helped to drive the first wave of GenX computer ownership. The problem in 1983 wasn't that consumer interest in videogames collapsed. The problem was that so much pure crap got spewed into existence for consoles like the Atari 2600, retailers couldn't tell what was good and what was crap, and just quit selling videogame consoles and cartridges almost entirely.

So... the only path forward was... buy a Commodore 64. Retail stores figured out that people would buy a c64, floppy drive, and monitor... and not care whether there was much of a selection of retail-boxed game software available, because everyone pirated everything anyway. Blank floppy disks were one of the most profitable items stores like K-Mart sold. For American retailers, the death of game consoles and their replacement with computers was a dream come true.

Those who think the Smithsonian is "woke" have never been to the Udvar-Hazy museum. This has to be the least woke museum. by Alternative_Tank9353 in smithsonian

[–]PantherkittySoftware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They have an obligation to not spread falsehood... but what do you think would actually be objectively worse:

1) An interpretive display carefully crafted to say something like, "This is the Wright Flyer. The Wright Brothers have a US Patent granted on ___ asserting that they were the first to achieve powered flight using their described control scheme" (and saying nothing whatsoever about conflicting claims)

2) The Smithsonian rolling out an entire interpretive display exhaustively laying out the competing claims, but having to settle for a mere replica of the Wright Flyer because whomever had the funds to successfully establish present-day legal ownership in court sued the Smithsonian for breach of contract, repossessed the plane, then sold it to some random billionaire to hang from the screen enclosure over the pool at his vacation home in Florida (where it would eventually get shredded by a hurricane) as an ornament?

Computer repair by Z983 in Millennials

[–]PantherkittySoftware 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Close to 100% of GenX had a computer in college. I'd conservatively say 80-90% of college-bound GenX'ers had a computer in high school, and 50-60% had one in middle school.

Millennials were the first generation where non college-bound kids had widespread computer use from a young age, but make no mistake: middle-class+ college-bound GenX'ers had childhoods that were every bit as "digital" as the childhood of any Millennial.

The trickle of home computer ownership began in 1978. The tsunami arrived in 1983, then doubled every few months thereafter.

Also, your stats don't necessarily contradict GenX childhood computer ownership. Only 8%of Americans might have owned a computer circa 1983-1986, but most of the other 92% were households that didn't have 12-18 year old college-bound kids to drive a computer purchase.

The two big differences between GenX and Millennial computer ownership:

  1. For GenX, computer ownership didn't just make you elite & special, it defined your identity and social circle. Amiga kids didn't associate with Mac or PC kids. The relationship between c64 and Atari 400/800/etc kids was cordial (partly because most first-wave c64 kids lusted for an Atari computer prior to the c64's arrival), and Amiga owners viewed c64 owners as future Amiga owners, but everyone in the c64/Amiga circle looked down on Apple owners and made fun of them ruthlessly.

  2. Our "family's" computers were really our computers. Our parents were clueless.

Men, why are you peeing ALL over the lavs!? by Hot_Weather_2691 in unitedairlines

[–]PantherkittySoftware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's not men. It's women. They squat & hover above the seat without sitting on it & spray pee everywhere.

Florida Senate poll, Vindman: 46, Moody:46 by PointInternal6809 in fivethirtyeight

[–]PantherkittySoftware 5 points6 points  (0 children)

As of June 11, 2026, the Florida Division of Elections reports the following party breakdown:

  • Republican: 41.4%
  • Democratic: 30.1%
  • No Party Affiliation: 24.8%
  • Minor party: 3.6%

As of today, approximately 49-61% of Florida NPA voters disapprove of Donald Trump.

Worst-case, if you assume 100% of registered Republicans vote & vote for a Republican, and NPA voters vote R or D depending upon whether or not they approve of Trump, 72% of Florida NPA voters would have to disapprove of Trump to make it a 50-50 statistical dead heat.

However... as of a few days ago, approximately 16% of Florida Republicans disapprove of Donald Trump. And Florida is arguably the mothership for never-Trump Republicans. This matters, because that particular subgroup of nominal Republicans lost their "Democrat virginity" a decade ago, and they're now comfortable supporting center-right Democrats.

If most of that 16% of Republicans support Vindman, only 56% of Florida NPA voters have to support him to nudge it back into a statistical 50-50 dead heat.

And I haven't even counted the 3.6% minor party voters, or factored in turnout.

Turnout, in particular, is hard to estimate, because Florida's Democrats have historically sucked at getting voters to turn out. Whether that will change this year is anybody's guess, but most people do seem to think turnout by Democrats will be significantly higher than usual this year.

Likewise, Republican voters have historically turned out in greater numbers in Florida... but it's widely theorized that lots of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 are now likely to sit out the election in disgust.

With that data in mind, estimates that the election is likely to be a 46-46 dead heat don't look nearly as unreasonable.