Only dozens? HK government getting soft now?

This is a politically-motivated ruling... Thailand's judiciary, including its constitutional court is packed with ultra-conservative royalists who deploy the law to take down their political enemies. Conveniently enough, politicians who are friendly to the royalist/military establishment aren't subject to such scrutiny.

It will be interesting to see how Rwanda manages after Kagame leaves the scene. In the past, he has styled himself after Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, but Lee stepped down and left behind a well functioning civil service and a second generation of political leaders who weren't hacks. Kagame seems to be avoiding talk about succession plans, which is not a good sign.

Funny thing is, TSMC in Taiwan is considered a premium employer. It offers much better pay and parks than other companies.

People are quick to blame Google for the slow uptake of Jpeg XL, but I don't think that can be the whole story. Lots of other vendors, including non-commercial free software projects, have also been slow to support it. Gimp for example still only supports it via a plugin.

But if it's not just a matter of Google being assholes, what's the actual issue with Jpeg XL uptake? No clue, does anyone know?

Riots caused by court rulings don't usually topple prime ministers. This feels really weird and off.

That's wild.

Bangladesh has actually been doing pretty well in the past decade, no? I know there have been concerns about Hasina's increasing authoritarianism over the years, but the stuff I've read indicated that she was actually quite popular, within the context of the country's incredibly polarized politics.

Having her toppled by a mob like this... while hoping for the best for Bangladesh, I can't help but feel quite pessimistic for the future of the country. For one thing, there's the distinct possibility that this is a military coup disguised as a popular insurrection. Hope that's not the case.

Decent affordable Bandai kits when...

They also pinky-promise that they are not running current psy-ops on many other topics. (Tee hee.)

That's like telling a starving person that long-term obesity concerns are the real issue.

Trump lost by around 50,000 votes in swing states, in the middle of a bungled pandemic response. In 2020, Biden was polling significantly higher than Trump; today he is polling significantly lower.

All this before that picture of Trump fist-pumping after being shot, which is going to be widely juxtaposed against Biden's inability to walk down 2-3 steps.

I don't know where this idea that Trump has "no chance" comes from.

Whelp... Biden was insistent on running, now the Monkey's Paw has answered. All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden will be running for the hills, and being the Democratic nominee is gonna be the worst job in politics for the next four months. And at the end of the campaign he gets to be remembered by history as the loser in the worst landslide election since Reagan-Carter.

Also:

• Sonia Sotomayor's decision not to retire during Biden's term is looking like yet another D own goal. Very real prospects for a 7-2 Supreme Court.

• We're going to be seeing an orgy of foreign governments jockeying to cultivate relations with Trump. Official US foreign policy is going to be dead in the water, and NATO and G7 will be leaderless, until next year.

• Trump is going to have an iron grip on the Republican party now, to an even greater extent than before. On various issues where other Republicans held positions contrary to Trump's, they're going to be brushed aside.

• For the above two reasons, Ukraine is pretty well fucked.

Polls have significant predictive power, especially when you poll reportedly and/or aggregate them. Which is why all political campaigns, R or D, spend literally millions running their own polling. Moreover, it's now July, the first convention is literally coming up within days, so the excuse of being "far out from the election" no longer holds.

Okay, this settles it: Biden is gonna be the nominee. Nobody else on the Dem side is gonna want to be the sacrificial lamb going up against Trump after today.

Are you being wilfully pedantic, or do you not know that it's possible to tell someone is ahead in a contest?

Lots of people seem keen to jump to this being staged. That makes zero sense: Trump was already winning before this, especially with Biden (his preferred opponent) looking to hang on to the nomination.

Bernie isn't a Democrat most of the time (not sure if he is one this year...), represents a state that will remain safely deep blue even in the event of a Trump landslide, and is far removed from the constituencies where voter support for Biden is cratering. So it's not surprising for him to have this opinion.

Not to mention his vested interest in the idea that politicians should remain in power long into old age.

Neither, it's the Fed.

Pick the old man as nominee, and you'll get the Nazis in January.

If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models...

That's the point. Biden's legacy is most likely a Trump second term, alongside a Republican Senate and House. Even if he wins by dumb luck, it would still have been a bad decision, like a bad poker play that wins.

Suppose the "best case" scenario for Biden materializes. He hangs on, remains the nominee, and pulls an upset against Trump in November.

Even in this scenario, I'd argue that his legacy is irrevocably tarnished. His decision in 2022/2023 to run would still be a terrible decision, like a poker player betting the whole pot on a horrible hand and winning by dumb luck. His staff would still be complicit in lying to the world. It would be the shabbiest victory imaginable... and all that before the question of how he lasts another four years in office.

Not "Democrats". One specific Democrat needs to ask that question.

This makes sense. Frankly the Teamsters union leadership would be negligent in not trying to court Trump. There's a political realignment going on right now as more working class people are shifting to the Republicans, and urban upper-middle class to the Democrats. If union leadership refuses to budge, they may find their membership drifting away.

Thanks, I hadn't seen those latest comments from Clyburn.

Now I have no idea what his position actually is, haha.

Clyburn's comments were intended to lay out a marker. He was signaling that if Biden steps down and the nomination doesn't go to Harris, he'll burn the outfit to the ground.

I don't think the election against Trump is the primary factor for him; he's simply maneuvering to maximize the tactical influence of the CBC, no matter the outcome. If Biden remains, he will be even more indebted to the CBC than he already was.

The Biden campaign's made a big deal out of how no CBC member has openly called for him to step down so far, and they're actively lobbying them to that end. That's also why he visited a black church over the weekend in one of his rare bits of campaigning. The calculation is that if all black lawmakers stay the course, the effort to replace Biden can be tarred as racist.

The Biden stay/go camps don't divide neatly by left/right. Progressives and neoliberals both want Joe gone; the ones sticking with him, or at least the ones he's appealing to for support, are the unions and the black caucus, which you can think of as the political machine wing of the Democratic party.

That's just political machines doing their thing. It's the same dynamic as the Soviet Politburo propping up Brezhnev long after he'd started drooling on himself on TV.

Biden is declining!

The main lesson is "don't be an incumbent".

Yes, the campaigning equivalent of a slow shuffle is realistically what "giving his all" means for Biden at this point. The problem is his insistence that this is also better than what anyone else could possibly do.

He's going to give it his all, but also he's going to make sure that he gets enough sleep and avoid scheduling events past 8 pm.

They sprayed him orange like Trump, lol.

Seems like the interview didn't go bad enough to force Biden out, but also not good enough to reassure anyone who had doubts about him. The Biden campaign death march continues.

No, if it was just a matter of having a well developed economy whose fruits are distributed poorly, then their GDP per capita (literally economic output divided by people) would be high.

But it's not. It's among the middle-income countries, just below Malaysia. Which seems about right in terms of the quality of life of the average citizen.

Yes. That means Chinese households actually consume less than this graph indicates. In other words, because China's economy is more manufacturing heavy, this graph makes it look more "developed" than it actually is.

Their economy is literally less developed. Country size has nothing to do with it; India is on track to surpass Japan's GDP but no one would dispute that it is much less developed than Japan or any other OECD country.

Because they're still a developing country with a relatively low baseline power supply per capita (half that of the US).

Maybe they were also the ones who stole his trains of thought.