Today I had a friend over and we started the process of painting the bookshelves I’m building.

My husband and I moved into a new house in December. This is the first home we’ve had that we can really treat as a forever home, so I’m going to go nuts on the built-ins. For the last two months I’ve taken over the living room and been working on a big bookshelf build. The fireplace had a set of low existing shelves around it, but I’m turning them into a set of magnificent floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They’re made from solid wood and built in place, made from countless pieces hand fitted together. Made with just a miter saw, drills, clamps, and a nail gun. I even learned how to do basic electrical so I could install the lights myself.

Anyway, I finally finished the carpentry. The trim’s all done. All the joints are caulked, all the nail holes filled. And so on to painting. And this afternoon a friend came over and helped me get the painting started. So great day, plus the weather is gorgeous out today. Very warm with a bright blue sky.

Exactly. Is there sexism in the electorate? Sure. But those folks are unlikely to vote for a Democratic candidate anyway. Maybe there are a handful of people that are deeply sexist but still want to vote for Democrats, but it kind of goes against the entire core brand message of the party. Just how many people are there that would never want to vote for a woman president, but also want to protect immigrant rights, queer rights, black and brown rights, etc?

And we should also not ignore positive sexism. Are there some people that would vote for a male Democratic candidate but not a female one? Probably. But there are probably even more people that would be persuaded to go from non-voter to Democratic voter simply to see the first woman elected president.

The example I always keep coming back to is Margaret Thatcher, curse her bones. She was elected prime minister of Britain…in the 1980s! Britain has a very similar political culture to the US. And she won while running as a conservative! Left of center voters, the people most likely to support a female candidate, opposed her. And rightly so because of her policies. But she was able to win over conservatives. If a conservative woman can become the leader of the UK in the 1980s, there is zero reason a liberal woman can’t do so in the US in the 2020s.

And yet, Biden barely won in 2020. He only won in 2020 because of Covid. And polls at the time he dropped out indicated he was on track to losing far worse than Kamala did. I think you’re just projecting your sexism onto the electorate.

Nah. Planes are too expensive. Let’s just have a giant oil canon that shoots oil in a huge fluid arc from the Middle East to markets.

The point is, in a country of 330 million people, we have no shortage of extremely competent and qualified people to serve at the highest levels of office. Sure you might vote in someone bad, but at least this keeps the bad incumbents from sticking around forever.

They don’t have to be though. We do not need petroleum to make plastics.

Those all can be produced from synthetic hydrocarbons made from atmospherically captured CO2. We don’t need to drill an oil well to make plastic.

“Vaccines aren’t the solution to polio. I support behavioral changes and personal responsibility instead.”

I think you’re just projecting your own sexism onto the electorate as a whole.

I’ve listened to him a bit in the past, but I’m not familiar with any recent work he’s put out.

All that’s needed is military supremacy.

And yet, people like you demand we vote blue no matter who, and insist that the time for inter-party feuding is during the primary. And then when there is a primary, you tell people to shut the fuck up and not criticize leadership.

Are you familiar with what an asymptote is?

I mean, you can masturbate about all laws, contracts, and agreements being a “threat of force,” but I don’t give such libertarian dogma any credence.

They’re stupid simple devices though. There’s not even any circuitry in a solar panel. There’s nothing to slip a backdoor inside. There’s caution, and then there’s just xenophobic paranoia.

There’s a limit to the gains from pooling insurance risk. Sure, you gain a lot by going from 1000 people in a pool fo 10000. But 10 million to 20 million? You reach a point where the law of large numbers takes over and adding more people doesn’t produce further gains.

People like to react that way to the idea, but it need not need be the purview of tinpot dictators. It’s good for a country to have a small amount of inflation. If your country is successful enough to maintain its currency for centuries without collapse or revolution, your currency will inevitably be devalued to the point of comedy. It should be just a reasonable thing for countries with healthy economies to do once every century or two. Sure if you do it every other year, it means you have a problem. But if it’s done only every few generations, it’s not something we should be afraid to do.

Craziest implementation? Burn the hydrogen in your home. But not in a furnace. Burn it in a mechanical combustion-powered heat pump!😁

That really took some balls.

In the novel Star’s Reach, in a post-collapse society, one of the main characters is a ‘miner.’ Their mining guild basically tears apart old concrete buildings, by hand, with sledge hammers to extract the old rebar from them.