> I wonder what the top Republican leaders honestly think about these foreseeable outcomes
It doesn't matter what they think. Trump's message resonates with the electorate much more effectively than theirs, partly because of his political brand and partly because he has a network of social media acolytes who broadcast his messaging to each segment and demographic. It's a positive feedback loop wherein anyone who dares to go off-message or criticize his decisions gets instantaneous blowback from the MAGA audience themselves, so they quickly recalibrate. At this point, Trump has built a metaphorical tower of skulls of political foes within the party (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene).
Despite everything that has happened over the past year, the Democrats only have a few percentage points lead over the Republicans in current midterm polling. As an outside observer: Absolutely wild. I know a lot about the reasons, but it still feels completely surreal.
Trump is not unique. You can find similar parties and figures in most of Europe. Usually the would-be autocrat populist is even more popular than in the US in two party systems. Multi party systems dilute it which just leads to paralysis until eventually >40% of your population is ok with abandoning democracy because the impacts of paralysis are stacking up (France).
The democrats have been an absolute failure of a party for the last decade and the fact their voters refuse to hold leadership accountable for those failures says everything you need to know.
There should have been a house-clearing of leadership up and down the party apparatus in 2016 and again in 2024 but nope. We'd rather hope those perpetual losers get their act together out of fear of the unknown.
The Democratic party is the reason Sanders did not win. Their refusal to back progressives in any meaningful way is exactly what I'm talking about. The dems would sooner let Trump have a 3rd term than allow a progressive like Mamdani to win the presidency, which is precisely my point.
He can’t actually do much with votes in Congress he doesn’t have. Take money from programs via executive order? Ok, I guess. Cut checks to voters with that money? Even the Supreme Court would blush at that.
They don't share Trump's message, or not exactly. They share an edited version of it. That seems to be why Trump has started insisting he's serious repeatedly. The conservative media is ignoring or toning down the least popular ideas.
It matters to me, because they were not powerless to stop this scenario. The point of a representative democracy.
After January 6th, Mitch McConnell could have whipped up the votes to impeach Trump. Forever banishing him from office. Or over the past four years, when asked, "Did Donald Trump lose the election" instead of equivocating, every Congressperson could have said, "Of course he did. Donald Trump is a loser who lost a fair election, but threw a tantrum when the result did not go his way."
Liz Cheney took a stand, and the party punished her for it. Trump was too popular, Republicans preferred to latch onto that energy, despite the consequences.
No raindrop thinks it is responsible for the flood. These leaders enabled this scenario, because they (correctly!) predicted it could help them hold onto power. Now we watch the results unfold as the world does everything to extricate itself from the USA.
Cars are almost a niche form factor at this point (sadly). The Mercedes-Benz GLS vastly outsells the S-class, and the same holds true for the BMW X7 vs. 7-series.
Obsidian still does not support iOS widgets. I use the app, but it's honestly still a major annoyance, since I cannot add to-dos with one swipe as I would be able to do with Apple Notes.
For decades, people have been able to change the temperature in their vehicles in less time and without taking their eyes off the road. Why defend an obvious regression?
Tesla fans sung the praises of other stupid ideas like the Highland's indicator buttons and the Plaid's 'yoke', both of which were silently shelved after buyer dissatisfaction.
Yoke was a mistake for sure (and FWIW works perfectly in Cybertruck because of steer by wire), but most people liked indicator buttons. The reversal is purely because social media pressure by people who never tried it.
> Why defend an obvious regression?
Because it's not a regression. Whenever I use my older cars with manual controls I see no benefit. Most of the time I still have to look at it - it has a dial or little screen to know what exact temperature you are setting.
Most people drive the same car most days. Either many or most people (I don’t have stats) drive a different car some days. There’s entire companies — Hertz, Avis, etc — with business models based around this observation.
However, making money is not an engineering problem. My previous employer 5x’ed their revenue with a largely feature-complete Rails application by hiring a kick-ass marketing team and actually looking at the usage analytics to tweak small things like form structure, the on-boarding flow, etc. The system design solves problems like scaling performance, avoiding tech debt, scaling headcount (microservices let multiple teams work on the code in parallel), and providing resilience, all of which have business value that is harder to quantify as easily.
The function of a system is what adds value to someone. The form is what incurs costs. These both are part of your system architecture. Thus, if your architecture is badly done, there is nothing left over between value added and cost and the organization cannot make money.
It is of course true, that the whole organization is the money-making system. Thus I find it jarring people talking about system design and assuming software by default.
The term originated on 4chan before the advent of mass AI-generated content. Only the normified definition of the word means "LLM-generated content I don't like".
It doesn't matter what they think. Trump's message resonates with the electorate much more effectively than theirs, partly because of his political brand and partly because he has a network of social media acolytes who broadcast his messaging to each segment and demographic. It's a positive feedback loop wherein anyone who dares to go off-message or criticize his decisions gets instantaneous blowback from the MAGA audience themselves, so they quickly recalibrate. At this point, Trump has built a metaphorical tower of skulls of political foes within the party (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene).
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