I dunno. I could see campaigns being willing to pay a fair bit for a list of email addresses of people who care about a specific topic.

I think Colbert is available.

As far as I know, this hasn’t been really confirmed with a smoking gun, as it were. There was an independent journalist named Adam Cochran who claimed this on X: https://x.com/adamscochran/status/2105090249445769519 . And it’s true that .si is the country domain for Slovenia, where Melania comes from, and where Barron also has dual citizenship. And it does look like there were several .si domains were purchased shortly before Trump’s announcement and then sold for huge sums, like “build.si.” But I don’t think it’s actually documented that there’s a direct connection to the Trump family in this, and that’s probably why mainstream news sources aren’t covering it at this point. Someone knew about this ahead of time and made money off it, and given this administration’s history, it would be kinda foolish to just trust that the Trumps aren’t among them. But it’s a big actual allegation to make without direct proof.

I dunno. I think you want to make efforts to get at what the voters actually want, and that means making some allowances for voters being, y’know, fallible humans.

Have a look at the “butterfly ballot” used in Florida in the in 2000 presidential election:

Now, it’s pretty clear to me, looking at that, that the top hole is a vote for George W Bush, the hole below that is a vote for Pat Buchanan, and the hole below that is a vote for Al Gore. But it’s also obvious to me how a voter could think that the second hole is for Gore, as the listing on the left side of the ballot has Gore listed just below Bush. I wouldn’t make that mistake here, but it’s plausible to me that people would. And indeed, people did. Buchanan got a LOT more votes than his polling would lead you to expect; and while this was still a small number of overall voters, it was more voters than the margin in multiple counties, including Miami-Dade. And Florida had enough electors, and the national election was close enough, that how Florida went decided how the whole country went. That is, these few people (less than 2000) making this mistake may have been a deciding factor in the national election of George W. Bush.

So while, yes, it’s the vote they cast, and if they can’t handle something as simple as voting then maybe that’s on them… it’s not like it doesn’t matter. We should want the outcome of the election to reflect the will of the voters, and so it makes sense to make some effort to make it easy for them to vote for the person they actually want.

Elections aren’t usually close enough for this kind of thing to matter. But it sucks when it does.

LegalEagle has a pretty good video about the charges. They are batshit. https://youtu.be/3zVpaHS6YD8

I live 3300 km away from Texas. That’s almost half again as far as Kyiv is from Paris. It’s not trivial to just pop down there for a march some weekend.

They don’t. They’re financing it via debt in an increasingly unstable and circular manner.

Sounds like it could be really useful for VR displays. The best optics for VR right now use polarizers to fold the optical path repeatedly through the same lens, but a side effect is that only a small portion of the light makes it to the users’ eyes.

Could also extend the battery life of phones; the display is the main power draw for most phones, and the higher brightness make that worse.

I understand why people are reacting badly to these being described as “brighter,” but it does also mean “more energy efficient for the same brightness.”