There has to be more to it than that. I seriously doubt that the entire country of Romania is sitting on TikTok, and was so easily swayed.
Also, when I hear "looks to be funded by Russians and Chinese, no proof so far but it seems quite credible". Sure, anything is possible. But how can it be credible, if no proof so far, as you say.
I am no expert on anything Romanian, but my skeptical bells are going off when I hear this.
> There has to be more to it than that. I seriously doubt that the entire country of Romania is sitting on TikTok, and was so easily swayed.
Romania isn't a de facto two party system like the US. There were 14 candidates on the ballot, 10 from various parties and 4 independents.
If nobody gets a majority the top 2 advance to a second round vote.
If I've matched up candidates and parties correctly, of the 10 party candidates at least 6 were from right wing parties, and collectively got 47% of the vote. But the way it was split among them the highest any one of them got was 19.18%. The second highest of them got 13.86% and the third 8.79%.
The highest non-right party or independent got 19.15% of the vote.
So no, Georgescu didn't need the entire country to be on TikTok. He only needed to get more than 19.15% to get to the second round. He got 22.94%.
If Romania had used a ranked choice or instant runoff type of voting system, which probably should be used when you have as many candidates they do from as many different parties as they have, Georgescu probably wouldn't have a chance.
For most of the 47% who voted right wing but not for him he probably would have been pretty far down in their ranking and been eliminated after a handful of rounds.
A lot of "influencers" did campaign for this guy, some of them not even knowing who are they doing it for. They signed contract with "talent company" to promote stuff without mentioning any name, but that stuff was his main point of the campaign, so they amplified the craziness. Not all of Romania is sitting on TikTok, but a large enough portion or around 2 million people voted him while most of the rest of the people never heard about him. The list of candidates was so long (>10) and some were not known, most people ignored them.
I personally don't know anyone that voted for him. It was a big surprise for most people. Now that videos of his speeches appeared in public space he has no chance to get any significant amount of votes as he sounds like a lunatic. This is why I said the entire thing is trolling.
Not sure if they are dead in the water or not. However, they have until July 30, 2026 to deploy half of their fleet or they lose the FCC granted frequencies. The fleet is 3232 satellites.
So far they launched 2 test satellites. They contracted most of the launches to either new rockets or ones in development, like New Glenn, Ariane 6, ULA Vulcan. They actually had to contract three Falcon 9 launches to help out with that. In reality, I think SpaceX will end up launching a lot more than that.
Unless FCC is willing to be lenient, 50% of the satellites will be hard to accomplish by the deadline.
The quick maths indicates that to achieve this, they’d have to launch 22.5 satellites per week every week for the next 18 months until that deadline. SpaceX seems to be launching at nearly twice that rate, having launched [1565 satellites](https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/10/30/live-coverage-spacex-t....) in the first 10 months of this year.
> I am sure it's doable if all the space providers work together and there aren't any showstoppers.
Are you living in a different world that me?
NO company or Government on Earth outside SpaceX has the capability to launch more than about 15 orbital rockets per year. Most are in the 5-10 per year range.
That's why I said "if all the space providers work together". That obviously includes SpaceX - they would be doing the heavy lifting here (mind pun intended).
> NO company or Government on Earth
Not that it's a possibility for Kuiper, but China had 67 launches in 2023.
I doubt that very much. Gwynne Shotwell stated multiple times that they will work with whoever. In addition, SpaceX is already contracted for 3 launches of Kuiper.
> Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported that Israeli officials supported Khan’s candidacy behind the scenes, and consider him a pragmatist who shies away from politicization.
This is nice, but it's not at all how students use ChatGPT (anecdotal based on my kid and her friends who are at the uni right now).
The way they actually use is to get ChatGPT to generate ALL their homework and submit that. And sometimes take home exams too. And the weird thing is that some professors are perfectly cool with it.
I am starting to question whether the cost of going to a place of higher learning is worth it.
Why do they get homework then? I don’t expect the professors are willing to go over and correct autogenerated LLM homework. The purpose of homework is to apply and cement knowledge. In some cases homework is so excessive that students find ways to cheat. If homework is reasonable, students can just do it and bypass LLMs altogether (at least for the purpose of the homework).
Some people see it as not worth and too boring to understand and actually solve it.
I had a few friends of mine that I used to teach in our course work. For some of the fundamental classes for stem (e.g. Probability and Stats), even though I tried to show him a way to arrive at the solutions, he tried to ask directly for the solutions instead of arriving at them by himself.
The same thing was true for probably me when I was studying geography and history in my high school years since they were taught largely by a collection of trivia knowledge that I did not find interesting. I would have used chatgpt and be done rather than studying them. But, when I took the courses that covered the same topics in history in my university, it was more enjoyable because the main instructor was covering the topic to tell a story in a more engaging manner (e.g. he was imitating some of the historical figures, it was very funny :))
As a professor it's frustrating. We want to give homework feedback for the students that actually put the work in, but we know that half the submissions are plagiarized from chatgpt, which is a waste of both their and my time.
The point of the article is to highlight how students should be using ChatGPT.
Now it's up to you to share it with your kid and convince them they shouldn't cheat themselves out of an education by offloading the learning part to an LLM.
This doesn't change the value provided by the institution they're enrolled in unless the teachers are offloading their jobs to LLMs in a way that's detrimental to the students.
It's called the "National Popular Vote Interstate Compact". The Interstate Compact part just means that it's a legally binding agreement between states.
It would be implementing a popular vote nationwide by circumventing the electoral college. It’s just a mechanism to get around modifying the constitution.
The current compact only kicks in is the electoral college vote and the popular vote differ.
That is quite a bit different than the popular vote as you can see this year when Trump would have basically run the board of electoral college votes without that caveat.
Either way, the person who wins the popular vote wins the election; what difference does it make how many electoral college votes they get (if the electoral votes are determined by a rule like that).
A bunch of people I know have moved out of the State. Mostly because housing here is completely unaffordable for an average couple. And it is doable in other states.
This is not just California. I live in Washington and wouldn't have been able to afford my house if I was buying today. Inflation + interest rates + price jumps.
Who else could they have possibly picked on such a short notice? I think, it made sense at the time - now, of course, we can all Monday morning quarterback.
For sure. I am asking who could they have picked after Biden's performance at the debates? E.g. after the damage was done. Kamala was probably the most prominent of all democrats at the time. The alternative would have been some no name senator or Hillary.
Back in the spring, I had a long conversation with my father (a lifelong Democrat whose only vote in a presidential contest that wasn't for the Democrat candidate was for John Anderson in 1980) about Biden's chances against Trump. He insisted that Biden made the right choice to run because nobody else seemed like they would have a good chance against him, but I argued that this was because Biden choosing to run again essentially made it impossible for anyone else to make a serious attempt at it, and that the best thing would have been for him to announce within the first couple years of his term that he wouldn't be running for reelection, which would have given other candidates a chance to make a case. I still think that I was right about this; anyone competent enough to be a worthy candidate in the general election would know that they'd have no chance at winning the nomination against Biden running as an incumbent, even if they'd have a better chance at winning the general election. Anyone reasonable who was concerned with Trump winning had no incentive to enter a contest they couldn't win and risk being perceived (perhaps correctly) as a spoiler who hurt Biden's chances, so the smartest thing for them to do both for themselves and the country would be to hide their ambitions until next time and hope for the best.
I know that I've probably been wrong ten times for every time that I've been right about something like this, but that didn't make it any easier to watch the last six or seven months. You're correct that there was nothing else anyone could have done to avoid the train wreck by the time Biden withdrew because the only way to avert it would have been to change speeds way back before we got to the sharp curve. The worst part is that I don't even think that Harris would have necessarily been a bad candidate if she had been given a proper chance from the start; there are articles as far back as early 2022 mentioning that her public appeal was hurt by the Biden administration tying her to issues like immigration and election reform. At minimum, ignoring the harm to her future electability showed extremely poor foresight, and it's not hard to imagine that it went beyond negligence to the point of outright sabotage of someone viewed as a potential threat.
It’s very unlikely that he would deliberately kneecap her. But I agree with you…that it was too late by the time he dropped out, the electorate had already made its mind.
In the end, I think his policies turned out to be great. But he didn’t have the skills to capitalize on the gains, to seize them and point to them as “wins”. Instead we often saw a somewhat slow, very old but good natured grandpa who was clearly not fully present all the time.
The policy on Gaza though, that made 0 sense. He had the power to bully Netanyahu into stepping back but consistently took no action. Solving that crisis would have been HUGE for reelection, keeping them festering only contributed to the feeling of chaos.
A relative worked at Fisker recently. The loan you are talking about was in 2009. That version of Fisker went out of business in 2014.
The most "recent iteration" of Fisker was basically a company from scratch. It was only called Fisker because it's original founder (Henrik Fisker) retained the rights to the name and logo.
This time around there weren't any loans from the US govt.
Which also failed which proved that the founder is a bad bet and that if the US government chooses to invest again, it should steer clear of that dude.
My point is public money shouldn’t be used for “investment”. If they contracted with the company to make a fleet and they didn’t deliver at least the public would have recourse to liquidate and collect. By handing out free money on a risky gamble, everyone loses.
Also, when I hear "looks to be funded by Russians and Chinese, no proof so far but it seems quite credible". Sure, anything is possible. But how can it be credible, if no proof so far, as you say.
I am no expert on anything Romanian, but my skeptical bells are going off when I hear this.
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