No, you won’t. Worst you’ll do is stay home on election day.

There’s some leftist picks that will make me pick Trump.

It sounds like you got a good head on your shoulders at least. I’m not sure if I’m convinced yet but I can appreciate your point of view now.

EDIT: I should note that I’m worried about the money because its $240 Million. That’s a lot for this portion of the race, and a lot of money to risk in this time where inflation has eaten away at most small people’s savings. I’m really not sure if Democrats will raise similar amounts if Biden drops out now.

Go cancel a Kickstarter and then tell everyone the team has moved to a new manager and everyone needs to switch their donations. And see how many people you get to successfully switch. Its only going to work if the new candidate is better than Biden. And you can’t even tell me who is better than Biden.

Chances are, you’re just a progressive hoping to bring down the party and warp it into your own mold. So anyone is better for you. But that’s the problem, I don’t trust Democrats. I’m not even a Democrat. If you throw this to chaos and try to get someone on the far left in I might vote for Trump.

Can you at least give me an idea of who you want in the top position? No. Because you know that risks tipping your hand. You’ve spent this entire discussion avoiding the subject.

I’m just saying: forget the delegates. Just discuss with me who you’d support. If not Biden and if not Kamala, then who? There’s a few governors who people have made as a rumor (but I’ve made it clear that I’m quite concerned about the financials / hundreds-of-millions pledged to Biden’s campaign). But since we disagree with that, we can move on anyway. Can you give me anyone who you’d support?

And if its Bernie so help me.

I mean, the main hope is that the Biden delegates basically get together and crown someone else the nominee.

The delegates are basically set since so much of the primary is done already. Having Biden drop out will force them to pick someone. (Without dropping out, the delegates may vote for Biden like they initially promised)

But we still have the big money problem, whoever they pick. Haris would be the leading contender of this process anyway just because of the money thing.

I’m not 100% sure if Harris can beat Trump, even if I support her personally. I just want the one who has the biggest chance to win and today that’s Biden from all options presented to me.

You’ve had 2016, 2020, and now the entirety of 2024 campaign season to come up with somebody.

Time is out. We pick now. Its Biden or Harris. You pretending like there’s a 3rd option ignores the fact that fundraising season is over and that you’d permanently hamper the new candidate to not have money in time for the November election.

Lets say Biden resigns tomorrow. Where does the campaign cash go? Maybe (and I’m not 100% sure), MAYBE Harris. But its not earmarked to anyone else. So that just burns that pile of cash effectively.

So maybe before going into the 2024 election without any fucking money, give this a few minutes of thought and come up with a better plan.

Obama circa 2008 hasn’t shown up yet. We’ll get to meet them in about three weeks.

Why didn’t your hypothetical and imaginary friend show up in the Democratic primaries earlier this year? And why do you delude yourself into thinking that they exist?

Some strong governors have been floated as options aside from Haris. But I’m not seeing how the various governor candidates deal with the money issue highlighted over the past week. Biden resigning, Haris inheriting the money and then picking a strong running made might be the best path forward.

Can you agree to this plan? Of course not. You’re resisting me. I know you won’t agree to this. If that’s insufficient, I’m pretending that Biden gets 25th-Amendmented on January 2025 anyway and Haris takes over. So I’m not seeing a major difference aside from Harris maybe getting a good VP pick to help her out this season.

Yeah. The plan to not have a plan at all.

Lovely. And you wonder why you lose independents and don’t like your style of governance.

Now come back when you have a real plan to win Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The chaos of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 caused the Republicans to win in 2012, 2014, and 2016.

I don’t think you guys are as good at chaos as Republicans. No offense. I’m betting on predictability. You guys think you’re winning when in fact you’re just turning the independents against you and killing your chances. Every fucking time.

Biden beat Trump. Biden got results. I’m still putting my trust in that over the random chaos that the far left asks for every time.

What we can’t have is another “Bernie or Bust” scenario, where we name a viable candidate too early, get everyone to fall in love, then replace them with unmitigated boredom. Naming a candidate today runs that risk.

The problem with Bernie is that he’s a socialist in a country that hates socialists. Yall picked poorly. We’re not running to make progressives feel good (like Occupy Wall Street in 2011) only to have Republicans kick your ass. We’re trying to beat Trump this year as priority #1.

I already said earlier who the alternative is: its Kamala Harris and only if some legal technicalities regarding Biden’s campaign funds can be figured out. Can you pledge your support of Kamala Harris today with me?

There’s some very large piles of money that need to be moved around and maneuvered here to support whoever the Democrats pick is. And a lot of that pile of money is signed and earmarked to Biden specifically. If Biden and Harris aren’t your pick, what’s your plan to do with the money?

Yes. You need to prove to me that Biden stepping out is better for Democrats and/or America than Biden staying in.

If your strategy is bullshit “I’ll figure it out later”, then sorry, I’m sticking with Biden for my support. If you can’t even reliably tell me that you’ll back Kamala Haris (or any other specificly named reasonable replacement), then that’s proof of your lack of strategy.

This is too important of an issue to fuck up and turn into chaos just a few months before the election. If yall don’t like Biden, then my strategy is for Biden to run and then resign in January, making Kamala President (and keeping the important technicalities of donations which are earmarked to the Biden campaign). Anything else has incredible amounts of risk tying up important money that’s been collected for months. (Alternatively, if someone can assure me that Kamala will have the full support of the Biden campaign’s resources if Biden leaves… I can support Kamala without a doubt).

Being concerned about your own race is not enough.

We need to know what the national strategy is. Who would replace Joe Biden? The fact that Scholten calls for Biden to get out, while is herself unable to name a reasonable replacement shows the magnitude of the problem. These Democrats want Biden to leave before a cohesive post-Biden strategy is formulated.

I’m not necessarily against replacing Biden. But I am absolutely against Democrats running around like a headless chicken 4 months before the election. Have Democrats settled on Harris as the replacement? Are yall actually cool with that?

Can you actually say “Harris should replace Biden” moving forward, rather than this wishy-washy “Please leave Biden” kind of talk? One statement speaks far louder than the other.

I’ll vote for Harris. I’ll vote for Biden. This strategy doesn’t affect me or my vote. So I see it as a waste of time. But if everyone else is nervous, give me a sign that you actually have a cohesive strategy moving forward rather than just having nerves or weak knees about this situation.

I expect progressives are using this as an opportunity to backstab Biden and most Democrats, and install someone much further left / appealing to their personal politics. That’s why progressives can’t name someone they actually want to run / replace Biden and want to just bring Biden down in the vain hopes that they win out in the chaos. But that’s too dangerous of a strategy for me moving forward. I want to know who actually has reasonable chances of beating Trump (and I think Kamala Haris has worse chances than Biden actually). I want to know who specifically these people want to support before Biden steps down.

If Elon fucks it all to hell they’ll break the company into pieces, sell the various pieces to other auto manufacturers and life will move on

You mean like Delorian? Or Fisker Ocean?

Nah man. When a car company goes under, they’re dead. We know what it looks like. Otherwise, the #1 car recommend should be Fisker Ocean since its like $25k per car right now. But we all know that company is dead and no one will buy it out of bankruptcy, save those cars, or offer services (or parts) on those cars moving forward.

Same thing if Tesla ever collapses. At best maybe some patents get bought out but no one will want to be left paying the bill and supporting the (now screwed) customer base.

A bunch of auto manufacturers are switching their primary port, that’s another way of fucking your charging network

I don’t think you realize how much Elon fucked over Superchargers with the firing.

There were projects with $50,000+ to $300k amounts put up by local businesses as they prepared for Tesla Superchargers to be installed in their parking lots earlier this year.

These businesses have gotten ZERO emails, phone or any other communication from Tesla. Why? Because the company fired everyone. Everyone involved in Superchargers is gone. That’s no more build out, no more maintenance, no more nothing.

Presumably Elon will figure out (eventually) that this is a bad idea. But then what? He already betrayed a huge number of business customers. Who will want to install new Superchargers in their business after this misstep?

Like I get it. Tesla is losing money and they needed to fire people to keep going. But its not a good look.

Hyundai Ioniq 5 or Ioniq6 seems to be the dumbest EV (dumb in a good way).

I would suggest most people get a PHEV, like the Prius Prime though.

The charger network: Superchargers are so much more plentiful than the alternatives, and there’s still not a great central charging app. I have 3 different ones installed on my phone and honestly most of them suck besides Tesla’s. Non-tesla chargers are basically just at apartments, businesses, and malls. Very few of which actually help me

Good thing Elon Musk fired the entire Supercharger team then.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside-story-elon-musks-mass-firings-tesla-supercharger-staff-2024-05-15/

Yes, Elon is a massive piece of shit. You know who else is? Every auto exec. The only difference is that they’re quiet and effective. Those old money fucks have done so much more harm to our planet because they know how to influence politics effectively. Something something, ethical consumption, something, something, capitalism

Other autodealers aren’t fucking their own company over by destroying the top reason you listed for buying their cars. We’re well into the point where its clear that Elon is a terrible businessman not just morally, but also for you as the Tesla customer. There’s no way Superchargers can be maintained (let alone expand) if the team is gone.

25GB and 50GB disks written at blistering 10MB/s in the age of 100MB/s Gigabit Internet connected to storage (S3, Backblaze, etc. etc.) means that networks have completely obsoleted Blu Rays.

I’m surprised they still found a use of these things. Flash drives are also so much cheaper, faster, and more convenient.

I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of personal computing device would fit in these power envelope.

I dunno if this is what I want, but I like the idea anyway. ESP32 is like 500mW class or so (very rough estimate because I don’t care to look it up right now lol). So you can get more than 24-hours of processing with 4x AA cells or 18650 Li-ion.

I feel like there’s something ‘under’ the classic smartphone that might still be useful as a personal gadget. But alas, smartphones are an always in your pocket device today. Bluetooth keyboard + Phone would be a more practical note taking application.

Maybe this same thing, but instead as a minimalistic SSH shell for computer IT tasks? I like the design of this things keyboard at least.

It got worse.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/elon-musk-vs-organic-farmers-bastrop/

As it turns out, Elon Musk had a bunch of farms + horses from all the land he bought in the 2022-era. Elon Musk was actively trying to get rid of horses on his new property.

Its not that Elon Musk was going to “buy her a horse”. He had tons of spare horses and was looking to dump them onto someone else.

No one is talking about automated theorem provers (see 4 coloring theorem) or symbolic solvers (see Mathematica). These tools already revolutionized math decades ago.

The only thing that came out in the past year or two are LLMs. Which is clearly overhyped bullshit.

Newspapers were always partially advertisement driven.

But I think everyone would agree with me that Newspapers were better when a substantial base of their $$$ came from their subscriber base.

Nothing is absolute in the world of money. There’s always additional sources of money elsewhere. From this perspective, I think we can argue that purely advertisement-driven media is what is most dangerous. Search is an important part of modern digital media, so thinking of the economic realities of funding, and how those economic incentives shape the website and future business is important.

Maybe it fails, but Kagi is trying something new. And that’s good enough as an experiment for me. I dunno, maybe I’ll revisit the idea in 5 years or so, that’s really not much money in the great scheme of things.

At very least, Kagi now has a “Fediverse search”, and now that “search-lemmy” seems to have died, I need something like Kagi to more easily search Lemmy.world and other Fediverse locations. (Google ain’t so good at this yet).

I’m just gonna plug “Kagi” here.

Kagi is a paid search engine. Yeah, sucks that we have to pay for good or decent search results, but… as the economic models of the internet change, we need to change with them. I’ve personally lost faith in freemium ad-supported websites in general.

Its an all-stock deal.

Meaning its down to like $47 Billion, last time I checked. As the stock price drops, the cheaper the pay package gets!!

The layoffs were known last week though.

Sure, the news is finally talking about the layoffs, but people were locked out of their badges and complaining last week about this. So now its official today, but it was public knowledge last week when that price declined dramatically.

So the employees were nominally on the books until today. Big woop. They stopped working a week ago and complained about it online. You can’t hide a mass of 10,000+ sad and angry employees talking shit about Tesla. The stock moved on that before the official layoff announcement today.

Zoom out about a week.

Its fair to say that last week, TSLA was oversold and is now bouncing back from that. But the -55% profits and -$2.3ish Billion FCF are bad numbers.

TSLA is down from $180, where it was just a few weeks ago. $140 prices this past week apparently was too low, but there’s no chance in hell that TSLA goes back up to pre-Q1 announcement numbers. Q1 2024 was awful. Declining sales around the world in all major areas: China, Europe, AND USA. They’re weak everywhere.