Newsom is the Next Man Up. Anyone else who runs in the Primary is really just auditioning for VP.

Recall on Trump? In what scenario would this happen?

God has the final word on Donald Trump. Someday, when he eats his last cheeseburger.

If God issues His Ultimate Recall vote on Trump, Vance immediately becomes President, and the office of the VP becomes vacant.

To fill it, President Vance would need to nominate someone, who would have to be approved by both the House and Senate.

But McConnell started a precedent that says that Congress can keep the position vacant by simply refusing to hold the vote.

Even so, a very good election night for Democrats in the upper chamber would only bring the Senate to 50-50, with a Republican VP serving as the tie-breaker,” he said.

If I were writing the script, I would have the Democrats win that 50/50 split in the Senate, then have the President eat his final cheeseburger. Then, Schumer will invoke the “McConnell” doctrine to sit on the VP appointment and not bring it to a vote at all. We lived without a SC Justice for nearly a year, and they are much more important than the VP.

Or is it building the infrastructure to accommodate them the issue?

It’s this, but that’s only part of the story.

Datacenter companies are very efficient at building new ones now, once they have all the proper permits and can start building it can go from an empty lot to fully functional in a year or two. Maybe longer for the huge hyperscalar ones.

Once they are online, their power demand is comparable to a small city, coming online all at once. But the local utility never had this demand in its plan, so they have to build more capacity to service it, and building a new power plant takes much longer. In the meantime, the demand will outstrip their capacity and the utility will have to buy more power on the open market. This drives up costs for all their customers unless the utility is allowed to charge these customers (whose existence has blown up all their capacity planning) more.

As a side note, they often get advantages and tax breaks because they promise to bring jobs to the area. And the initial construction jobs usually are significant. But once the place is built, it’s ongoing operations only requires a few dozen positions, many of them low-tech and outsourced like site security. The higher-tech jobs (like the network engineering) is often not on-site anyway. A shopping plaza would generate more jobs than a datacenter.

The only poll that matters is in November

They get permission to hate the people they want to hate. See? They think it is a fair deal.

Wait, you mean the guy who owned a beauty pageant was part of the sex trafficking operation? Who would have guessed that?

Maybe this movie will end like Raiders of the Lost Ark

He’s not being self aware at all, he’s just whining. It’s a justification for a decision he’s already made.

“We have to do it because nobody else will”. That’s probably the same logic he used to put his name on the Kennedy Center, or his picture on all of his buildings. Doesn’t he want to put his face on a quarter? And Mt Rushmore? Seems to me we’re being forced to memorialize him everywhere.

No, that’s not quite how it works.

Calling the newly minted coins a transaction fee “paid from the pool of unmined coins” isn’t really accurate, as those coins didn’t exist until they were mined. The algorithm carefully controls how many new coins are made.

But miners do not set fees at all. Users set their fee when they make their transactions, and miners pick which transactions they want to attempt to validate. We expect miners will pick the transactions with the highest fee per byte, because they want to increase their reward if they manage to find a block. But they don’t have to, and they may have reasons to pick other transactions.

The whole point of it being trustless is that no party needs to coordinate. Users create transactions, miners validate them.

Bitcoin was extremely successful at making what it set out to do in the first place: make a fully distributed, peer-to-peer, trustless currency. Anyone who has ever been forced to pay bogus transaction fees ought to be able to appreciate paying for things without needing a bank, or any intermediary at all. It’s like cash you can e-mail.

But, most people into crypto now don’t care about this utility, they just want Number Go Up. So they don’t transact with it anymore, they just hold it (or actively trade with it). Which makes the whole ecosystem not useful for anything except feeding itself.

I still think that, in theory, there are areas where cryptocutrency can be used for real innovative purposes. But these will never actually be done, because the people in a position to do those things would rather make quick money selling shit tokens to unsuspecting people.

Do you want to learn how it all works? Feel free to do so, it’s all Open Source. But if your goal is to invest… Well… You still need to learn about and understand it first. This will help you differentiate the good ideas from the scams. (And there are a lot of scams!)

RGB should have stepped down early in Obama’s second term, when Democrats still held a majority in the Senate…

Congress? That body currently run by Mike Johnson and John Thune?

We’ll get a special prosecutor, all right, and it will be Matt Gaetz.

I look forward to the “Donald J. Trump Memorial” anything.

Not just any Republican, she was Trump’s nominee for UN Ambassador, until that got withdrawn because the Republicans were losing too many House seats to Presidential appointments.

So, she decided to run for Governor, until a better connected male candidate decided to run instead, so she backed out of that.

It seems like her entire year can be summed up by getting screwed over by other Republicans. No wonder she wants out.

When the President does it, it’s not illegal…

“illegitimate” is different than “illegal”. In some context they are the same, but “illegitimate” can also mean “against rules” or “against custom”.

The President nominates these officials, but they take office “with the advice and consent of the Senate”. I take that to mean that after the President consults with the Senate, he makes an appointment, and the Senate is obligated to give an up-or-down vote on it.

I remember that time well, and Merrick Garland (yes, that guy) was the compromise candidate that Obama picked because he had the respect, of a lot of Republican Senators. The Senate had a constitutional duty to put it to an up or down vote, which Mitch ignored, because he would not like the outcome. (If Garland didn’t have any Republican support, after all, they could have just held the vote, and voted it down. But that would have given Obama another chance to nominate someone else.)

There is no law that says “the Senate must act within this period of time”. We can’t haul McConnell to the brig because of it. Yet, it is clear to me that he flat out ignorea something the Constitution obligated him to do. It can be clearly seen as illegitimate, especially when he changed those rules a few years later.

It’s illegitimate because Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on Obama’s last SC pick, because he knew it would pass if that vote was held. So he left the SC one member short until Trump won, and they confirmed his pick instead. Basically, he (and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee) exercised a two-person veto on the pick.

He claimed it was too close to an election to act, but then when RBG passed away with even less time before an election, he pressed ahead with Trump’s pick anyway.

He made up a new rule, then abandoned it when it was expedient to do so. If rules mattered, one of those picks would have been different.