They are supremely loyal but relatively few enough to be outvoted by the other voters that more casually voted for him. It’s harder for me to grasp, but there are folks that voted for him that wouldn’t be going to his rallies or anything.

There’s a lot of folks who are either.:

Vote republican by default, but a shock could change them.

People who vote for or against the status quo based on how the feel things are going. Trump lost in 2020 in part due to people voting against whoever was in office. Hilary Clinton probably would have lost in 2020 had she won in 2016. Trump won in 2024 in part due to similar sentiment to vote out the current party after the inflation that was likely unavoidable consequence of not collapsing from COVID.

Yes the MAGA cult is unwavering, and they are a huge factor in the GOP primaries and certainly an asset in the general election, but they are not enough to assure an election.

The thing was that they resorted to the tan suit and terrorist first bump bullshit because Obama gave them so little to work with. For Trump you didn’t need to waste everyone’s time when his administration is ignoring court orders, arresting judges, declaring warrants and due process unnecessary, and tanking the economy.

The tan suit stuff may have helped energize the base by preaching to the choir, but everyone else found it ridiculous and made them skeptical of conservative media. When you are inundated nearly daily with real terrible stuff, boo need to undermine credibility by latching into this sort of fluff.

Looks like it’s illegal in 17 states, some with various exemptions for using a single earbud either for anything or for select purposes only.

Depending on the earbud/phone design, even if off they can really reduce your ability to hear the world. Sure playing an open stereo too loud can have a similar effect, but it’s much easier to drown out things when your ear is stuffed or fully covered, without some sort of audio passthrough system.

Probably a balance between it would make it cheap for them to produce, but also bring down the barrier to entry for third party manufacturers to compete with them.

Headphones are considered like ear plugs. A tendency to block out surrounding noises like horns and sirens.

This may shock you, but guns are banned more often than phones in school, and the bans are more severe as are the consequences.

The phone bans I have seen always allow phones in pockets and bags, just not out casually.

I agree, the third big single powerful person is certainly Xi. I suppose one can say the “sociopath” is more evident with Netanyahu than Xi, because for now China is able to sit back and let Russia and USA self sabotage to a weaker position while mucking with the rest of the world, while China gets to play comparative good guy in foreign policy. This is of course grading on a curve, they aren’t saints either.

Maybe they hope they can tuck him away and go back to “managing” him. Maybe they can patch his image a bit if they can keep him away from anything important enough to piss people off.

I think the assumption is stated to placate his ego, to attract him away from continuing to tank his image. It’s not that they want him with Tesla so much as they want him away from government.

Tesla as a company is in a damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

When you look at the business fundamentals versus the stock valuation, it’s clear something doesn’t add up, and at least formerly elons image was a big part of it.

Then he went full mask off and tanked his image.

So without the musk cult, is there enough to support their over inflated valuation? What does a post cult Tesla look like, when other companies have proven they can catch up or pass Tesla on various fronts people thought Tesla might be unassailably ahead. The various potential horizontal growth opportunities like solar and home batteries have fallen flat, their robot demonstration was significantly faked, and they are late to the self driving cab game, at best. A solid company, but not worth more than all their competition combined as their current valuation suggests.

So I think the hope is that he gets preoccupied with “making Tesla great again” and away from screwing with government. Then hope that people kind of forget about his political machinations and things sort of go back to the way they were for the hopefully forgetful public.

So while RFK Jr. is dangerously and stubbornly doing some wrong stuff, this at least conceptually wasn’t a horribly dangerous idea, though perhaps uselessly naive.

It was proposed as a voluntary sort of facility that someone could go do if they chose, and from how it was described, ability to leave whenever they felt like too.

Generally speaking, I view RFK Jr as dangerous due to his convictions, naivete, and belief in some gnarly conspiracy thearies, but not intentionally malicious.

The thing is that the shell provides so little innate functionality and delegates anything more to an ecosystem of random quality, and then subjects those authors to a pretty capricious interface that breaks random extensions every six months generally driving a lot of the authors to throw up their hands and give up.

So the native functionality is solid, though even lower features than Microsoft windows window management, and then have to apply dodgy extensions to get features that other solutions just have as a matter of course.

If I didn’t know any better, I would have assumed that gnome shell was some small demonstrator project to serve as a reference implementation (e.g Weston) rather than intended for serious use. I came over from gnome 2 thinking things went pretty far backwards, but the extensions are going to be stop gaps while they build back up to a balance desktop. But they never seemed to do that.

Ultimately, I landed on Plasma and that’s been pretty good. Have some embedded/kiosk stuff using sway thanks to the very nice scriptable facilities there, but still sticking with kwin as a daily driver for now.