After the Emissions Scandal and an estimated 10 thousand excess deaths a year in Europe because of diesel emissions: Fuck the European Auto Industry.

Their dragging of feet on moving to EV technology is also disgraceful.

And don’t get me started on the over-reliance on cars in most of Europe.

All in all, they’re a negative for Europe, not a positive, and if they can’t compete with the bloody Chinese, well, let the Free Market they so love for everything else do a little Constructive Destruction on them,

It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.

Several years ago I looked into importing LED Lamps from China into the EU as a business and exchanged some emails with manufacturers in China and analyzed some samples of their products.

Basically they compete on price and hence advertise for bulk purchasers (so basically the no-name and white label brands) the version of their product with the cheapest power converter they have, which is quite crap and more of a hack than a proper converter. However if you pay them a bit more (back then it was maybe 10c for a good LED light bulb that costed less than $1 from the factory) they’ll use proper power converters.

As a consumer and if you’re buying no-name brand lamps you can try and get the ones with the better power converters by buying “dimmable” LED lamps (even if not using a dimmer) because to get the LED lamps to react properly to the effects of a dimmer in the power that’s fed to them, the lamps need to have the better power converters (that do proper AC-DC with voltage step down conversion, rather than the sort of shortcuts used for the cheap converters). Unsurprisingly, dimmable LED Lamps cost more than the regular ones, though nowadays LED Lamps aren’t really expensive.

Stuff designed for Europe which has a CE mark has since 2017 to have been tested for (if I remember it correctly) at least 20,000h of use and 10,000 on-off cycles with no more than 5% failures, plus there is also a maximum loss of brightness of the LEDs (as the light emitting diodes themselves tend to lose a bit of brightness with use after manufacturing) and rules about color quality.

The stuff I get here in Portugal, even no brand stuff from Chinese stores, has quite a low failure rate and I have been using LED lamps for ages (to the point that all the lamps more than paid for themselves in energy savings versus the other options back when I started)

So you might try choosing lamps with CE marks.

Any unbiased “what if candidates had done things differently” evaluation must include the actions of all candidates that resulted in a Democrat loss. This means it should include how much Clinton herself screw her own chances, for example by comparing the votes she got on those states with the votes previous Democrat candidates got in those states.

(I strongly suspect that Clinton has a far larger proportion of the blame for her own defeat than all 3rd party candidates put together)

This focus on blaming everybody else but your own leaders is just the traditional tribalist mindset of “the chief is good, it’s everybody else whose a problem”. The decades long enshittification of the Democrat Party is mainly the product of its supporters acting as mindless tribalists rather the rationally, thus not holding their “chiefs” to same standards as they do everybody else.

Unsurprisingly we see the very same problem of the Democrat Leadership having carte blanche from the party fans to do just about everything and even damage their own electoral chances - with, as we see right here, the members of the tribe eagerly scapegoating it all as being the fault of 3rd party candidates - with their support for the Israeli Genocide.

Isn’t that just tribalism or clubism in general?

For example, if one looks at footbal (soccer for Americans) fans, their “judgement” on the validity of faults and sanctions (or lack thereof) is entirelly dependent of whose team they support and almost invariably they side with whatever the important people of “their” team (like the coach, important players and even the club’s manager) say with zero logical analysis and if you actually bring logic into it and it goes against “their” team, the biggest fans just get angry and dismiss it all.

People with a strong emotinal bond to a “team” judge messages in that domain based on the messager and which team it favours, rather than on the contents of and supporting evidence for the message itself.

Since Psychopathy and Sociopathy are ranges rather than absolutes, it’s estimated that about 4% of humans are Psychopaths or Sociopaths and we’re talking about the what’s basically the handful of people in a universe of over 300 million who seeks and achieves positions at the top of the Power Duopoly in the US in a domain well know for it’s cut-throating and backstabbing, I would say that the odds heavily favour the explanation of them being very high on the Sociopath (or Psychopath) - so called “well adjusted Sociopaths” - spectrum than them being normal people who are “relaxed about personally enabling the murder of tens of thousands of children”.

The image of a Sociopaths or Psychopath who actively seeks to inflict horrible pain on others for their own pleasure is incredibly atypical and Hollywoodesque - being high on those scales just means having no empathy for others, including their suffering or joy, and the result is that a Sociopath or Psychopath simply does that which they think is better for themselves and they can get away with (they care about the consequences for themselves, not for others), with absolutely no consideration for how that makes others feel, hence harm or even death of others is fine since that has the same emotional resonance for them as breaking an inanimate object.

Fossil Fuels are decreasing as a percentage of the overall energy supply that powers so much of the Economy and Industrial and Agricultural production in Western Economies are a small fraction of the total (less than 20% together).

Nowadays it’s not about the West making things with pillaged resources from the Global South, it’s all Financialization and the Ultra-Wealthy extracting the last leftover wealth from everybody, everything and everywhere like the endgame in a Monopoly Game.

Oil by itself is not enough justification, IMHO.

Besides, Israel is being the very opposite of a force for stability in the region, which isn’t going to help the Petro-Dollar.

(If you go check the Gold markets, it’s never been this high, something which possibly signals increasing distrust in the US Dollar and other main currencies)

You can chose to dip you hands in the blood of thousands of dead children by activelly rewarding a candidate who is enabling their murder, or you can chose not to.

Given the lack of Democracy in the American system, that means that you either participate hence end up with blood on your hands no matter which of the two electable candidates you vote for or do not participate.The choices of others who do participate are irrelevant for that decision.

Justifying your choice of supporting a enabler of child murder candidate because others might chose the candidate you dislike the most and hence makes you fear for yourself, is not the high moral standpoint you seem to think it is.

Absolutely, it’s a though choice. However this preaching you and those like you are doing about “Not voting is a vote for Trump” is not done from the top of a Moral High Horse, it’s from the top of the pile of the bloody bones of tens of thousands of murdered children which is still growing, and driven by at best selfish self-preservation not any kind of selfless moral principle.

So spare us the bullshit.

The slaughter of innocent children makes no difference to sociopaths.

If there is one thing this Genocide on its way to Holocaust has shown us. is that the Democrat Party leadership are without a doubt sociopaths of the worst kind: a normal person with the power they have would not be actively helping it by sending the Neue Nazis the very weapons which they know are being used to massacre children.

There really is no other possible conclusion: no normal person would go “yeah but our campaign contributions from the AIPAC are more important than tens of thousands of dead children” or “yeah but the profits of the MIC shareholders are more important than tens of thousands of dead children”.

It’s called Stockholm Syndrome: people without options often end up genuinelly believing that the guy who tortures them only twice a week rather than daily is “deep down a good guy” and even “is our friend”.

Yeah, but unlike Biden who is a Fascist-just-not-at-home-(yet), she’s an actual Leftie, which comes with the whole “Nobody deserves to be murdered because of their race (even if they’re non-White Muslims and the killers are White Jews)” mindset.

Personally the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the one I find that really beats all others in this.

It’s a well known phenomenon that the more people self-compliment about some great quality they have, the less that is the case.

A similar thing seems to happen at a political level - the countries were politicians just harp on and on about how great their Democracy is (in the case of the US) or how old it is (in the case of the UK) have the most flawed Democracies (if they even count as Democracies given how far they stray from the “all votes are equal” criteria) whilst in the best Democracies out there (like The Netherlands where they have Proportional Vote) they never talk about how great a Democracy they are.

I believe it’s called Overcompensation.

Personally ever since I figured this out I treat such self-complimenting boasts (both at an individual and at a nation level) as big red flags and so far that rule of thumb hasn’t failed me.

True - the US of late has been a great inspiration for what NOT to do.

That explains the US, but that’s about it.

For example Europe there are no movements towards making abortion illegal, quite the contrary.

That’s because when talking to tribalist types, you’re seen as either with them or against them and in a system with 2 political parties “against them” means “supporting the other guys”.

There is no independent thinking amongst the “party supporter” masses, only following and parroting of the party messages, so the idea of somebody being a genuinely independent thinker guided by personal principles rather than following some tribe or other is anathema to them.

Liberalism isn’t the same as Left. It’s not even in the same political axis.

You can’t really read “more liberal” as being the same as “more leftist”.

Left would be something like: “I want the greatest good for the greatest number”.

Liberalism would be something like: “I want people to have the most freedom to do whatever they want”.

You might notice that these two things collide in things like the existence of the super-rich, were for a liberal that’s a good thing (they have maximum freedom) whilst for a Leftie it’s a bad thing (wealth concentration reduces the access to resources for the many hence it directly goes against the greatest good for the greatest number).

Similarly centralizing control of part or the whole of the Economy (which decreases trade freedom) to achieve greater equality is absolutelly valid within the Leftwing principles and entirely against Liberal principles.

it’s only in places like the US, were the entirety of Leftwing is about 4 congressmen, that Liberalism gets confused with Leftwing.

So by Israel’s own standard of discourse, they’re “using human shields” and hence any amount of killing of Israeli civilians is perfectly justified not matter how great the disproportion of civilians to non-civilians killed, their age or gender.

At least back when I lived in the UK the Greenparty were the only national party which was Leftwing, though I believe nations other than England did had more mainstream left of center parties.

I was actually a member of the Greenparty until I left the UK following Brexit and at least the people in my local are were trully well intentioned people though quite naive (IMHO). Then again in the UK I worked for almost a decade in Finance - which was pretty much Sociopath-Central - so maybe it was me being significantly more cynical and skeptical than average rather than them being more naive.