Lie on the beach in winter: the sun is pathetically un-warm.

Adjusting the angle at which you recline won’t make the sun any warmer.

So your intuition is off here.

Imagine someone puts an opaque shell around the earth at cruising altitude, and cuts a metre-square window in it.

Put that window directly over the equator, wait for noon. You will have a metre-square patch of sunlight on the ground.

As the sun heads towards the horizon, the patch of sunlight stretches into a long east-west tail, just like a long shadow.

The same amount of energy is coming through the window, but it’s spread over a much larger area on the surface, so there’s fewer watts-per-square-cm hitting the ground.

Now move that window north 30 degrees. Wait until noon, and the patch is already smeared into a long tail north-south, and that’s before applying any east-west smear. As the sun heads for the horizon, it’s going to be even more spread out into a great big enormous oblong, extended in both directions.

Now, entirely replace that shell with windows, and through the raytracing gets more involved, the same principles are at work.

That’s why mornings and evenings are cold, that’s why winter is cold, that’s why it gets colder towards the poles. You’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the sunlight hitting the area where the earth is.

They’re just setting the tarriff to half the ‘trade deficit’ percentage.

Where the actual trade amount is trivial, this leads to ludicrous results.

You’re always going to a chunk of political support by oppressing minorities, anyone considered ‘other’. A percentage of people are always going to hate, mistrust and blame the out-group for everything wrong with their lives, and this makes them very easy to lead round by the nose.

Stoke enough hatred, and people will gladly give up due process, human rights and social equity in the name of oppressing those they see as the enemy.

And once you can do that, large corporations can exploit the absolute shit out of the population, way harder than they could with all those pesky laws, regulations, oversight, etc. They can use slave labour from the concentration camps, steal the land and wealth from the people they kill or imprison, and they can rewrite laws to suit themselves, secure in the knowledge that anyone opposing them can simply be disappeared off the streets.

I use dashes all the fucking time, mainly becasue I feel selfconscious about the number of semicolons I’d otherwise use.

I have a bajillion old (pre APIgate) posts on reddit, so perhaps some of the blame for the AI penchant for the things rests on my shoulders. Sorry 'bout that.

edit: :reads harder: oops, as opposed to normal hyphens. Yeah, nobody human got time for that.

I worked for a company once that installed a remote-activation killswitch in their drivers, as a secret weapon to force the customer to stay current on their maintenance contract.

The CEO was a fuckup however, and the code killed their system even without being activated - resulting in a bunch of angry phonecalls and some of the most egregious lying I’ve ever heard.

god, he was a piece of shit

So the assault isn’t some necessary part of their plan to target Hamas, it’s just a fucking holocaust they’re using as a threat.

Good to know.