Appeals to the lowest common denominator - isn't that how you win elections?
Which is why Trump was in fact the most qualified Republican to be their nominee. The whole process has morphed into a gigantic reality TV show, America's Next Top Politician. Reality TV has been Trump's career for the last few decades, so he was a professional among amateurs.
I figure we are about 8 years off from President Camacho
Trump may come in on a wave of fear and flag waving but his power will be limited by his office. I predict that once he is in office he will accomplish little to nothing because the other branches will reign him in.
A lot of this is discussing how things work when Congress isn't backing up the POTUS. The last 6 years have basically been an object lesson in how little power a POTUS can possibly have, if both houses of Congress work as hard as humanly possible against him.
If, as appears likely, Republicans keep control of Congress, and they get their President, then President Trump is quite likely to have the full force of Congress behind him instead of against him. That will be a whole different kettle of fish. I'm old enough to remember when Regan was considered an extremist candidate. Then everyone looked at how weak Carter was, and said "How much damage could the guy really do?". Within his first 100 days, Regan essentially dismantled the New Deal. I remember people wearing black arm-bands.
Now you may be a person who agrees with what the guy did. That's not my point. My point is don't go into this thinking the next president will be powerless and won't change anything drastically. I've seen it happen.
This is more extreme in that nobody can reasonably go over that much proof, no matter how dedicated they are, but in principle it could be done by overlapping teams of people. It won't be, because people don't doubt it sufficiently. Various people will look at various parts of the proof. But it *could* be done.
This has to be seen as a problem. I'm not a mathematician, but I do have a Master's in CS, and I can pretty much guarantee you that program they ran to generate this proof has a bug in it. It may not be a bug that affects the proof, but *all* programs of any appreciable size have bugs in them. ALL.
So yeah, the future Gawkers could find themselves tamed a bit if the billionaires and celebs fight back.
Most "celebs" aren't billionaires, so their coverage won't be affected in the slightest. In fact, the only one I know of who is one is Oprah. (eg: Jay-Z and Beyoncé combined only get about 3/4th of the way there) There aren't that many billionaires (about 540 in the USA according to Forbes). Most of them are either people who struck gold in tech, are money managers, or people who inherited wealth. Those are the one and the only class of people who tabloids now have to fear.
So again, I say:
Future Gawkers won't behave better to people in general, they'll just give a free pass to billionaires.
So, what's the big issue? This guy saw an opportunity to attack an opponent albeit in the shadows.
The issue is that it wasn't necessarily the judgment, but all the legal fees that are bankrupting Gawker. If HH had lost, it wouldn't have ended because this guy could just go find another mercenary to hire to sue Gawker again for him. Its sort of like gambling where the house always wins in the long run, not because the odds are slightly in their favor, but because they have way more money than you. If you tick off a rich guy, he can just spend you into the ground with lawsuits. Basically, this guy has shown the whole country that he (and by extension all his other multi-billionaire buddies) has superpowers you and I don't have access to. The First Amendment is no protection if you cross him.
Future Gawkers won't behave better to people in general, they'll just give a free pass to billionaires.
The others are just new generations of Pebbles. The Core however is something altogether different.
It looks like a device to take the whole "talking to the network" functionality off of your "phone" and put it into is own displayless device. The implication of this is that there's now no need to "upgrade" this component constantly. The only time you'd need a new one is when there's a newer faster cell network tech you want to connect to. But even when that happens, its only a $69 upgrade.
If you want to do stuff like run apps, or surf the web, you can do that with a separate device, which you can "upgrade" whenever you want a new display technology. That device could have the form-factor of a phone, or a full-blown tablet, or something in-between. Whatever you want. But it now has nothing to do with a cell carrier whatsoever. The Cell carrier only interacts with your $69 Core unit.
This completely changes the way we (well, I at least) think about cellurlar tech. Its going to take some time to fully wrap my head around it.
Directly, you are quite right. However, they do give a huge steaming smelly shit if its cheap or not. Over the long haul, the open platform is going to be cheaper because it has more competition. They don't prefer the cheap platform because it is open, they prefer the open platform because it is cheaper.
I had to quit breakfast in my late 20's to keep my food intake down to sustainable levels for my new metabolism. As I got older, one of the other meals has started to go too. If I just eat an Apple for lunch I really don't miss anything else. If I end up eating a full lunch, dinner is really unnecessary. If I tried the 3 meal thing, I'd either be one of those guys ordering bunless burgers with no fries and a water all the time, or I'd weigh over 300 pounds within a year or two.
If you like your 3, and don't gain tons of weight that way, more power to you. But like the parent said, your hunter gatherers ancestors often had a spurty diet, and managed to survive and eventually have you. If you aren't hungry, and aren't under weight, there's no reason to eat.
Anyone else here old enough to remember the Four basic food groups, one of which was entirely taken up by Dairy, which a lot of humans flat out can't digest properly at all? After a while (and a lot of embarrassing gastrointestinal distress), they decided that was BS and created the Food Pyramid. The basic idea of that one was that you should be eating a metric shitload of breads. Today we call those "carbs", and these same types of people will tell you to avoid them like the plague.
Point being that nutrition "experts" have a long proud history of being completely full of shit. They'll even admit it. But that was before. They're right this time.
Breakfast thing being case in point. Young people should probably be fed if they are hungry, but if they aren't its usually downright stupid to force food on them. For older people this goes triple. I found with advancing age that my metabolism has slowed down to the point where if I try to force even 2 meals a day on myself, I gain weight. That's bad. Much, much worse than just eating only the 1 or 2 times a day I'm actually hungry.
No, that's the biggest symptom. But Android was new once too. It got past that because it was the most open platform available. Open is better for developers because the barriers to entry are lower. Open is better for buyers because all the competition keeps their prices lower.
The biggest problem with Windows Phone is that they are trying to fight an established competitor with no new genre-busting capabilities and a less Open product.
Only if you count all the out of date crap. I dont count ANY phone not running Android 6 as...
It doesn't much matter how you count. For example, here's a graph of new phone shipments. Android phones are more than 80% at the end there, and climbing. Here's one for actual sales. The best you can say for Apple here is that they are bouncing around under 25% (with Android over 75%). This has been going on for 5 years now, so installed base graphs should (and do) show almost the same picture.
On the plus side, since this has been going on for 5 years now, there's no good reason to believe Apple's 20-25% of the market is suddenly going to go away. There's also, of course, no good reason to believe it will enlarge.
It's not, or at least it's aimed at the wrong people. The young muslim who wasted his time in faith schools...
...by and large isn't joining ISIS. The young Muslim who got a higher degree, has trouble getting a job using that degree, feels dissociated from the culture he's currently living in, and doesn't actually know much about Islam itself, that's who's joining ISIS.
This tragedy may also add several percent points to Mr. Trump's popularity, and could possibly win him elections.
Whereopon he will promptly engage in all sorts of actions and statements that will be a tremendous boon to Islamist recruiting.
Extremists from both sides may talk a lot of smack at each other, but they are each other's best allies. Look at Asad and ISIS. Neither would be in power today without the other.
A "blackface filter" I could see some having a problem with. Particularly if it did something really offensive like make you look like a white performer in a 1920's minstrel show. But I follow a lot of the big names in "Black Twitter", and not only have I yet to see anyone up in arms about this, I've seen several (eg: @Deray) use the flower-crown filter themselves.
Honestly, real activists generally have better things to worry about. Like not getting shot in the streets for nothing, or asked for identity papers when using the John.
They're part of the executive branch - you know the ones that are charged with enforcing the law? That branch has shown repeatedly, in every administration in the past 50+ years, that it cannot/will not control the CIA (not to mention any other alphabet-soup agency).
The Bush Administration controlled the CIA just fine. The torture was their own idea. The CIA didn't even know how to do it at first, and had to raid the military's SEER (anti-torture training class) for expertise.
Talk to professional interrogators, or the people that have actually studied the subject.
According to them, torture is worse than worthless because the 'intelligence' you gather is far more likely to be false than anything else.
Not quite. If you want to get to the truth of what happened, then torture is worthless. However, if you want someone to say a specific thing regardless of what the truth is (eg: admit to a crime), torture can be very effective.
For example, the CIA was feeling pressure to prove their methods were effective. So their main goal whenever they tortured someone at their black sites was to get them to give up names of others who they could kidnap and torture. They became sort of the Amway of torture. The victim would eventually start giving names of anyone plausibly Muslim they may have rattling around in their head, and then the next round of renditions would begin. The CIA could then throw up all the numbers of names and leads they were getting as proof that their methods were working.
You will to this day hear Bush Admin. officials cite these numbers to defend their torture program.
When/if they become viable, personally I think they will take off like a rocket (metaphorically).
There are 2 basic groups of people that it will be a godsend for: suburban parents and the elderly.
There was a time when I had no less than 3 kids on soccer teams and 2 taking martial arts. It wasn't unheard of to have all 3 in practices on opposite ends of town at once. There were years where my wife and I would come home from work to a nice 4-hour second job of driving kids to activites. Freeing parents from that would be a tremendous boon. We are talking "shut up and take my money" territory.
For the elderly, they often get to the point where they are afraid to drive when there's traffic, or after dark. This is why the are notorious for having dinner at ridiculously early hours. My wife's grandfather kept his car far past the time he should have, even though driving scared the bejeebers out of him, because without it he and his wife were essentially a prisoners in their house. Being able to keep their freedom without having to drive themselves would have been like gift from God for them.
In fact, the margin of approval over disapproval has gone up a full 10 points since the week of Dec 22-27. That is a huge swing. I don't see anything in that data that suggest anything but the public's reaction to the notion of a Trump/Clinton election battle.
Trump was not the presumptive nominee back in December. There were still 2 debate stages worth of Republican candidates back then, four of which were polling in double-digits (the others being Rubio, Cruz, and Carson). So if your theory is that Obama was looking good by comparison at that point, it would have to be against the entire Republican field, not just against Trump.
Do you all think it's accidental that as soon as we know who the candidates for president are going to be that Obama's approval ratings go up?
Not only don't I think its accidental, I don't think its true. Obama's numbers have been going up since November 2014. The only thing that's coincidental with is his last election.
I've seen two schools of thought on the reason for this:
School 1 is the "he's out of F*cks" theory. Not having to face reelection again, he's just doing what he wants to do, and what he thinks best without regard to Republican complaints about it. This is the kind of behavior his supporters were wanting all along, so they are happier with him now.
School 2 is that now that there's no longer any real gain from tearing the guy down, the Republicans have aimed their massive media slime machine elsewhere. Particularly at Hillary (and to a certain extent at each other). So now his popularity is no longer being artificially dragged down by their attacks, and its rising back up to something resembling its natural level.
As the author of the top-rated answer there, I can try to summarize: If we stick to the debate among professional historians (and not random people with grudges), the schools of opinion are:
0.25 - 0.5 million US lives and millions of Japanese lives were saved.
Thousands of US lives were saved, and 0.25 million Japanese lives were lost
Which camp a historian falls in depends on weather they believe the Japanese would have surrendered very soon without a US invasion of the home islands or not. (If you are interested in the pros and cons for those, read the link I gave). But personally I think from the US perspective they were forced to behave as if it was going to be worst case for their side (the first option). If historians *today* still aren't sure which it would be, arguments that US planners should somehow have known the collective thinking of enemy leaders at the time is patently ridiculous. If we can't figure it out in hindsight, they certainly couldn't know then.
There was an interesting article in Foreign Policy a couple years ago (possibly paywalled link here [foreignpolicy.com]) which argued that the Soviet declaration of war was what really prompted the surrender. The author bases this on several arguments, among them:
The problem I have with this argument is that you don't hear a lot of serious historians making it. The guy who wrote that article (Ward Wilson) is a full-time anti-nuclear activist, not a historian. In other words, he spends all his time trying to convince people that Nuclear weapons are inherently bad, and should all be gotten rid of.
Now that's a legit opinion, and he's welcome to it. I can certainly think of less noble ways to make a living too. However, its indisputable that 1) He's not an expert on the Pacific theater of WWII, and 2) The existing historical consensus that the nuclear drops precipitated the surrender is very inconvenient for him in his day job.
Wilson's argument is discussed in this question on the history stack, if you're interested.
That supercharger map does look like pretty impressive coverage.
However, I don't really find that 100% helpful. If I'm just driving around town, I won't use 200 miles in a day, and can easily charge at home. If I'm driving long distances, the dang thing takes too long to charge even with the Supercharger.
For example, I'm noticing from one of those maps that there are about 4 stations proposed between Tulsa and St. Louis (the old hallowed RT66 route), roughly 160 miles apart. The car's advertised range is about 200 miles. I could charge to 80% in about half an hour, but that would be cutting it really close, with no room for error (or air-conditioning). So I'll want to spend at least an entire hour, if not the full 90 minutes, charging at each stop. This turns what is about a 6-hour trip in a gasoline car (counting fuel stops) into a 9+ hour trip. Effectively, you spend more than A THIRD of your trip sitting around waiting for a charge.
OTOH, if I were running one of those traditional roadside "tourist trap"s, I'd be all over getting myself on this charging network. Might as well go look over the World's Largest Ball of Twine while you are charging.
He's not actually trying to accomplish anything, so I seriously doubt Thune cares that much. These hearings are just about blowing time and grandstanding a bit while waiting for the next election. This Congress is basically like a lower-table soccer team that is sitting on a tie against a better team, and is just trying to chew up clock. Hearings like these are their equivalent of dribbling the ball into the corner and waiting for someone to come try to poke it out (so they can do it again). Or grabbing their ankle and rolling around on the grass a bit because someone from the other team came within 10 feet of them.
The only part of this that would give Thune pause at all is this:
Hugs and Kisses,
Facebook
Send a gay lobbyist to deliver those hugs and kisses personally, and you could probably chase the guy right out of Washington.
Slashdot Mirror
Appeals to the lowest common denominator - isn't that how you win elections?
Which is why Trump was in fact the most qualified Republican to be their nominee. The whole process has morphed into a gigantic reality TV show, America's Next Top Politician. Reality TV has been Trump's career for the last few decades, so he was a professional among amateurs.
I figure we are about 8 years off from President Camacho
Trump may come in on a wave of fear and flag waving but his power will be limited by his office. I predict that once he is in office he will accomplish little to nothing because the other branches will reign him in.
A lot of this is discussing how things work when Congress isn't backing up the POTUS. The last 6 years have basically been an object lesson in how little power a POTUS can possibly have, if both houses of Congress work as hard as humanly possible against him.
If, as appears likely, Republicans keep control of Congress, and they get their President, then President Trump is quite likely to have the full force of Congress behind him instead of against him. That will be a whole different kettle of fish. I'm old enough to remember when Regan was considered an extremist candidate. Then everyone looked at how weak Carter was, and said "How much damage could the guy really do?". Within his first 100 days, Regan essentially dismantled the New Deal. I remember people wearing black arm-bands.
Now you may be a person who agrees with what the guy did. That's not my point. My point is don't go into this thinking the next president will be powerless and won't change anything drastically. I've seen it happen.
This is more extreme in that nobody can reasonably go over that much proof, no matter how dedicated they are, but in principle it could be done by overlapping teams of people. It won't be, because people don't doubt it sufficiently. Various people will look at various parts of the proof. But it *could* be done.
This has to be seen as a problem. I'm not a mathematician, but I do have a Master's in CS, and I can pretty much guarantee you that program they ran to generate this proof has a bug in it. It may not be a bug that affects the proof, but *all* programs of any appreciable size have bugs in them. ALL.
So yeah, the future Gawkers could find themselves tamed a bit if the billionaires and celebs fight back.
Most "celebs" aren't billionaires, so their coverage won't be affected in the slightest. In fact, the only one I know of who is one is Oprah. (eg: Jay-Z and Beyoncé combined only get about 3/4th of the way there) There aren't that many billionaires (about 540 in the USA according to Forbes). Most of them are either people who struck gold in tech, are money managers, or people who inherited wealth. Those are the one and the only class of people who tabloids now have to fear.
So again, I say:
Future Gawkers won't behave better to people in general, they'll just give a free pass to billionaires.
So, what's the big issue? This guy saw an opportunity to attack an opponent albeit in the shadows.
The issue is that it wasn't necessarily the judgment, but all the legal fees that are bankrupting Gawker. If HH had lost, it wouldn't have ended because this guy could just go find another mercenary to hire to sue Gawker again for him. Its sort of like gambling where the house always wins in the long run, not because the odds are slightly in their favor, but because they have way more money than you. If you tick off a rich guy, he can just spend you into the ground with lawsuits. Basically, this guy has shown the whole country that he (and by extension all his other multi-billionaire buddies) has superpowers you and I don't have access to. The First Amendment is no protection if you cross him.
Future Gawkers won't behave better to people in general, they'll just give a free pass to billionaires.
If i use a display that only updates once per minute and no notifications, battery lasts 2 weeks.
I've got one ("Very Fuzzy") that only updates about every 10 minutes. Right now the time reads "one or so".
It sounds silly (and it is), but its also very functional. Its very rare when I check the time that I actually want more precision than that.
The others are just new generations of Pebbles. The Core however is something altogether different.
It looks like a device to take the whole "talking to the network" functionality off of your "phone" and put it into is own displayless device. The implication of this is that there's now no need to "upgrade" this component constantly. The only time you'd need a new one is when there's a newer faster cell network tech you want to connect to. But even when that happens, its only a $69 upgrade.
If you want to do stuff like run apps, or surf the web, you can do that with a separate device, which you can "upgrade" whenever you want a new display technology. That device could have the form-factor of a phone, or a full-blown tablet, or something in-between. Whatever you want. But it now has nothing to do with a cell carrier whatsoever. The Cell carrier only interacts with your $69 Core unit.
This completely changes the way we (well, I at least) think about cellurlar tech. Its going to take some time to fully wrap my head around it.
nobody gives a shit if their phone is "open".
Directly, you are quite right. However, they do give a huge steaming smelly shit if its cheap or not. Over the long haul, the open platform is going to be cheaper because it has more competition. They don't prefer the cheap platform because it is open, they prefer the open platform because it is cheaper.
I had to quit breakfast in my late 20's to keep my food intake down to sustainable levels for my new metabolism. As I got older, one of the other meals has started to go too. If I just eat an Apple for lunch I really don't miss anything else. If I end up eating a full lunch, dinner is really unnecessary. If I tried the 3 meal thing, I'd either be one of those guys ordering bunless burgers with no fries and a water all the time, or I'd weigh over 300 pounds within a year or two.
If you like your 3, and don't gain tons of weight that way, more power to you. But like the parent said, your hunter gatherers ancestors often had a spurty diet, and managed to survive and eventually have you. If you aren't hungry, and aren't under weight, there's no reason to eat.
Anyone else here old enough to remember the Four basic food groups, one of which was entirely taken up by Dairy, which a lot of humans flat out can't digest properly at all? After a while (and a lot of embarrassing gastrointestinal distress), they decided that was BS and created the Food Pyramid. The basic idea of that one was that you should be eating a metric shitload of breads. Today we call those "carbs", and these same types of people will tell you to avoid them like the plague.
Point being that nutrition "experts" have a long proud history of being completely full of shit. They'll even admit it. But that was before. They're right this time.
Breakfast thing being case in point. Young people should probably be fed if they are hungry, but if they aren't its usually downright stupid to force food on them. For older people this goes triple. I found with advancing age that my metabolism has slowed down to the point where if I try to force even 2 meals a day on myself, I gain weight. That's bad. Much, much worse than just eating only the 1 or 2 times a day I'm actually hungry.
No, that's the biggest symptom. But Android was new once too. It got past that because it was the most open platform available. Open is better for developers because the barriers to entry are lower. Open is better for buyers because all the competition keeps their prices lower.
The biggest problem with Windows Phone is that they are trying to fight an established competitor with no new genre-busting capabilities and a less Open product.
Only if you count all the out of date crap. I dont count ANY phone not running Android 6 as ...
It doesn't much matter how you count. For example, here's a graph of new phone shipments. Android phones are more than 80% at the end there, and climbing. Here's one for actual sales. The best you can say for Apple here is that they are bouncing around under 25% (with Android over 75%). This has been going on for 5 years now, so installed base graphs should (and do) show almost the same picture.
On the plus side, since this has been going on for 5 years now, there's no good reason to believe Apple's 20-25% of the market is suddenly going to go away. There's also, of course, no good reason to believe it will enlarge.
IOW: "Quit trying to understand what's going on, and grab your damn flaming torch and pitchfork along with everyone else."
It's not, or at least it's aimed at the wrong people. The young muslim who wasted his time in faith schools ...
...by and large isn't joining ISIS. The young Muslim who got a higher degree, has trouble getting a job using that degree, feels dissociated from the culture he's currently living in, and doesn't actually know much about Islam itself, that's who's joining ISIS.
This tragedy may also add several percent points to Mr. Trump's popularity, and could possibly win him elections.
Whereopon he will promptly engage in all sorts of actions and statements that will be a tremendous boon to Islamist recruiting.
Extremists from both sides may talk a lot of smack at each other, but they are each other's best allies. Look at Asad and ISIS. Neither would be in power today without the other.
A "blackface filter" I could see some having a problem with. Particularly if it did something really offensive like make you look like a white performer in a 1920's minstrel show. But I follow a lot of the big names in "Black Twitter", and not only have I yet to see anyone up in arms about this, I've seen several (eg: @Deray) use the flower-crown filter themselves.
Honestly, real activists generally have better things to worry about. Like not getting shot in the streets for nothing, or asked for identity papers when using the John.
They're part of the executive branch - you know the ones that are charged with enforcing the law? That branch has shown repeatedly, in every administration in the past 50+ years, that it cannot/will not control the CIA (not to mention any other alphabet-soup agency).
The Bush Administration controlled the CIA just fine. The torture was their own idea. The CIA didn't even know how to do it at first, and had to raid the military's SEER (anti-torture training class) for expertise.
Please, no false equivalencies here.
Talk to professional interrogators, or the people that have actually studied the subject. According to them, torture is worse than worthless because the 'intelligence' you gather is far more likely to be false than anything else.
Not quite. If you want to get to the truth of what happened, then torture is worthless. However, if you want someone to say a specific thing regardless of what the truth is (eg: admit to a crime), torture can be very effective.
For example, the CIA was feeling pressure to prove their methods were effective. So their main goal whenever they tortured someone at their black sites was to get them to give up names of others who they could kidnap and torture. They became sort of the Amway of torture. The victim would eventually start giving names of anyone plausibly Muslim they may have rattling around in their head, and then the next round of renditions would begin. The CIA could then throw up all the numbers of names and leads they were getting as proof that their methods were working.
You will to this day hear Bush Admin. officials cite these numbers to defend their torture program.
When/if they become viable, personally I think they will take off like a rocket (metaphorically).
There are 2 basic groups of people that it will be a godsend for: suburban parents and the elderly.
There was a time when I had no less than 3 kids on soccer teams and 2 taking martial arts. It wasn't unheard of to have all 3 in practices on opposite ends of town at once. There were years where my wife and I would come home from work to a nice 4-hour second job of driving kids to activites. Freeing parents from that would be a tremendous boon. We are talking "shut up and take my money" territory.
For the elderly, they often get to the point where they are afraid to drive when there's traffic, or after dark. This is why the are notorious for having dinner at ridiculously early hours. My wife's grandfather kept his car far past the time he should have, even though driving scared the bejeebers out of him, because without it he and his wife were essentially a prisoners in their house. Being able to keep their freedom without having to drive themselves would have been like gift from God for them.
In fact, the margin of approval over disapproval has gone up a full 10 points since the week of Dec 22-27. That is a huge swing. I don't see anything in that data that suggest anything but the public's reaction to the notion of a Trump/Clinton election battle.
Trump was not the presumptive nominee back in December. There were still 2 debate stages worth of Republican candidates back then, four of which were polling in double-digits (the others being Rubio, Cruz, and Carson). So if your theory is that Obama was looking good by comparison at that point, it would have to be against the entire Republican field, not just against Trump.
Do you all think it's accidental that as soon as we know who the candidates for president are going to be that Obama's approval ratings go up?
Not only don't I think its accidental, I don't think its true. Obama's numbers have been going up since November 2014. The only thing that's coincidental with is his last election.
I've seen two schools of thought on the reason for this:
School 1 is the "he's out of F*cks" theory. Not having to face reelection again, he's just doing what he wants to do, and what he thinks best without regard to Republican complaints about it. This is the kind of behavior his supporters were wanting all along, so they are happier with him now.
School 2 is that now that there's no longer any real gain from tearing the guy down, the Republicans have aimed their massive media slime machine elsewhere. Particularly at Hillary (and to a certain extent at each other). So now his popularity is no longer being artificially dragged down by their attacks, and its rising back up to something resembling its natural level.
Maybe they saved even more lives than they took, both Japanese and American.
FWIW: That exact question was asked on the History stack.
As the author of the top-rated answer there, I can try to summarize: If we stick to the debate among professional historians (and not random people with grudges), the schools of opinion are:
Which camp a historian falls in depends on weather they believe the Japanese would have surrendered very soon without a US invasion of the home islands or not. (If you are interested in the pros and cons for those, read the link I gave). But personally I think from the US perspective they were forced to behave as if it was going to be worst case for their side (the first option). If historians *today* still aren't sure which it would be, arguments that US planners should somehow have known the collective thinking of enemy leaders at the time is patently ridiculous. If we can't figure it out in hindsight, they certainly couldn't know then.
There was an interesting article in Foreign Policy a couple years ago (possibly paywalled link here [foreignpolicy.com]) which argued that the Soviet declaration of war was what really prompted the surrender. The author bases this on several arguments, among them:
The problem I have with this argument is that you don't hear a lot of serious historians making it. The guy who wrote that article (Ward Wilson) is a full-time anti-nuclear activist, not a historian. In other words, he spends all his time trying to convince people that Nuclear weapons are inherently bad, and should all be gotten rid of.
Now that's a legit opinion, and he's welcome to it. I can certainly think of less noble ways to make a living too. However, its indisputable that 1) He's not an expert on the Pacific theater of WWII, and 2) The existing historical consensus that the nuclear drops precipitated the surrender is very inconvenient for him in his day job.
Wilson's argument is discussed in this question on the history stack, if you're interested.
That supercharger map does look like pretty impressive coverage.
However, I don't really find that 100% helpful. If I'm just driving around town, I won't use 200 miles in a day, and can easily charge at home. If I'm driving long distances, the dang thing takes too long to charge even with the Supercharger.
For example, I'm noticing from one of those maps that there are about 4 stations proposed between Tulsa and St. Louis (the old hallowed RT66 route), roughly 160 miles apart. The car's advertised range is about 200 miles. I could charge to 80% in about half an hour, but that would be cutting it really close, with no room for error (or air-conditioning). So I'll want to spend at least an entire hour, if not the full 90 minutes, charging at each stop. This turns what is about a 6-hour trip in a gasoline car (counting fuel stops) into a 9+ hour trip. Effectively, you spend more than A THIRD of your trip sitting around waiting for a charge.
OTOH, if I were running one of those traditional roadside "tourist trap"s, I'd be all over getting myself on this charging network. Might as well go look over the World's Largest Ball of Twine while you are charging.
He's not actually trying to accomplish anything, so I seriously doubt Thune cares that much. These hearings are just about blowing time and grandstanding a bit while waiting for the next election. This Congress is basically like a lower-table soccer team that is sitting on a tie against a better team, and is just trying to chew up clock. Hearings like these are their equivalent of dribbling the ball into the corner and waiting for someone to come try to poke it out (so they can do it again). Or grabbing their ankle and rolling around on the grass a bit because someone from the other team came within 10 feet of them.
The only part of this that would give Thune pause at all is this:
Hugs and Kisses,
Facebook
Send a gay lobbyist to deliver those hugs and kisses personally, and you could probably chase the guy right out of Washington.