| Air travel is still safer than cars, but it's definitely not as safe as it was. Air traffic controllers have to be under even more pressure with firings in the FAA. That was already an extremely high pressure job that less people want. Most people have government jobs because they like public service. It's not about the money to them, they could get paid more elsewhere probably. It's sad they are being treated as if they do nothing. Their loss will be felt by Republicans in the end. And all of us unfortunately. Every day the people at the top of the government show they don't know what they're doing. Musk continues to run things despite not actually being in charge. The mistakes they're making, that they even admit, are insane, firing and then having to rehire the people back. Musk is very like Trump. They both somehow became rich, but it's not clear how they did it. Their leadership skills are non-existent. I don't get Trump supporters in things like law enforcement and the military. After Jan. 6th, I don't get it. They could play naive before, but since then, I don't get it. I would hope pardoning people that literally seriously injured, and ultimately killed, some police officers, would change some minds. Or siding with our literal enemy. If this were World War II, we'd be cozying up to Hitler probably. Ukraine might get some of its territory out of this if the US successfully blackmails them for rare minerals, but that's about the best they could hope for under the new administration. Hopefully Europe and the rest of the world isolates us and our new policies and stands up for Ukraine. We certainly abdicated our position as the leader of the free world. What do people in uniform think about now being friends with countries that hate democracy? The oldest people in my family are pretty much, if not all, against Trump, even if some were perhaps Republicans. But the younger generations in my family, I think most all of them, are for Trump. I did find a few days ago on Facebook, while getting pictures there from a family member, that a cousin is actually very much against Trump. That was nice to see since they live in a very Republican state. I have some family members in those states that I think have worked for some of these republican candidates. I haven't looked online to see more. It is what it is. If everything you hear about is pro Trump, from family, friends, social media and the news you see, that's just what you go with usually. Would be nice if people woke up, but I'm not counting on it. That's why I don't know where we're going from here. I just can't talk politics with a Trump supporter. I don't bring in up with neighbors, who are mostly Republican. Much of my family in other states, due to distance, I didn't usually see but maybe once per year when my grandmother was alive. We would maybe have a birthday for her and at most I'd say hi. We used to have picnics at a park, but she got too old to have those family gatherings so I haven't seen many of them other than briefly at best since before the pandemic. But we just couldn't talk politics. These are not trivial issues, we're talking about the fate of democracy and it doesn't get bigger than that. I don't think anyone has a federal government a job in my family that I know of, but I really don't know what most of them do. Most live in small towns in Republican states, so Trump country. Republicans need to wake up themselves. I can't help them. They need to get to the point where so many terrible things happen and they themselves have to question things. House just voted on a massive tax cut of trillions for the rich. It's clear that there will have to be massive cuts to programs Trump says he won't touch. They are acting like they can save trillions in waste. The not an official agency thing, DOGE (which they technically renamed another agency, but whatever), had lied about cutting waste already. They aren't going to magically find trillions lying around without cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The House GOP know that. But their rich friends, and themselves, will get a nice tax cut. And with that money, those in the GOP will get paid off, or whatever you call it, campaign finance contributions, so they can hurt people even more next time around. Money talks. The only thing that can save things is the Senate, where sometimes there are a few Republicans who care just enough. Not about the people they would hurt in some cases, but the fact that their constituents at these town halls, and future elections, might have something to say. With the House, they get in there because there are pretty much enough crazy people in most districts where they could literally do just about anything and not lose in a primary or the election. Probably even a bonus for the primary. Senators, they have to play more moderate. But they approved all the nominees so far, so hoping they will stand up to any angry phone calls or threats from Trump or other members is wishful thinking perhaps. But if it passes, the rich will get much richer. The poor will get much poorer. Trillions will be added to the debt. There will be cuts to the things that Trump even today said wouldn't be cut. They lie. And if we have an election again and a democrat because president, the GOP will be like, hey, this debt is too much, we need to do something about this immediately by cutting everything. That's how this country goes. No idea how that changes. As for some GOP voters out there, some people are mentally ill and will never get to the point where they see things clearly. People don't like being told they're wrong. Also, some people are just prone to believing things that are false. They'll believe a social media post with a lot of likes from bots over years, or even decades, of research by doctors and thorough studies. How do you counteract that? It's kind of a lost cause in a way. Social media makes people believe ridiculous things. Many of the social media companies in existence are pulling back from moderation, some considerably. Twitter is lost. Facebook is nearly there. I'm sure Google will find ways to destroy YouTube if they want to get in on the party. I remember a time when conservatives pretended their voices were silenced. They pretty much hold all the cards now. MSNBC was about the only TV network that still was liberal, but they just fired or reassigned some people and they are going to be spun off into a different company that some crazy republican might buy and destroy. (Like Elon) I might add Cesium as an option eventually for the model plots. While the mapped images are from a third party, often Esri/ArcGIS, I have hosted the code for it locally. So it uses a lot of bandwidth which could possibly be an issue for my site if they ever decided to limit my bandwidth. I was kind of originally on an unlimited plan, but nothing is really unlimited and their newer plans have limits. However, while I was always kind of leery of using a CDN, a content delivery network, I never paid too much attention to them. But in looking now I see that cdnjs is owned by Cloudflare, which is where I host my domains now. So I probably will use them in the future, at least as an option if needed. I had explored using a CDN previously as an option in the code and in the future I probably will. Cesium also uses a lot more memory than the 2D ArcGIS maps. ArcGIS can be in 3D too as an option, so I might go that route. But I do like the having the idea of having multiple options. The issue with the model plots compared to the recon system is that the recon system simply uses the Google Earth model files and display them in Cesium. No changes are made. For the model system to use the model plots, that would mean loading the data like the Google Earth file would in Google Earth. But then you couldn't remove a model for example. I would have to code a display to be able to do that. Eventually I might get around to that. The main thing I like about Cesium too is that someone created that control for it that is like Google Earth. I wouldn't know how to adapt it for ArcGIS probably. I like the idea of having multiple mapping options in case one goes way. When I write the code for ArcGIS, I am going to have that in mind. I won't know how easy it will be to switch between two until I get around to working on the code. |