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With control of the entire judicial system from the top down, Trump could end democracy and he's already given himself criminal immunity. The clever thing is that he has convinced a lot of Americans that the "other side" are the real threat to democracy. I've lived through similar in the UK. We had a right-wing government promising all sorts of things like reduced immigration and a better economy and they never delivered. The only thing they were effective at was adding zeros to the end of their own bank balances. I know that Biden's term hasn't been easy for people but there was a global pandemic for petes sake. Had Trump not lost in 2020 he would be taking the blame for that now, and not Biden. When he lost in 2020 he gave the reputation of democracy a good kicking, for good measure. As a result many of his voters don't even trust the same process they used themselves last week which gave rise to their voice electing President Trump. If Trump believes so firmly that US democracy is corrupt and the votes rigged, he would be whining about it all the time and not only when he's losing. Project 2025, ending democracy, stitching up the justice system, removing checks and balances, abolishing department of education, destroying people's trust in gov. institutions and the courts, enabling Communist Russia and China to do as they please to the rest of the world is serious shit. And we have barely scraped the surface of the shit! Look at the character of those around him... Some of them are truly monsters. I think the people who voted for him did so for a variety of reasons... Some liberals believe that a majority of them did so out of sexism and racism. I don't believe that. I think undecided voters and swing state voters had good economic reasons to want change, and a change of government, but struggling people no matter where they are or who they are, are much more susceptible to con tricks and their critical thinking goes out the window in a social media age of mass rumour, misinformation and hysteria. They believe the wrong stuff but think that the other side is equally as wrong. As usual the actual truth lies somewhere in the middle and I dislike the extreme right / extreme left viewpoint, it is not the way to have a unified nation. Believe me I don't just watch the mainstream news and see the US from the outside - I am living the same shit in the UK, we are the same kind of society with the same kind of two party politics and the same interference from Russia, the same hybrid warfare and same problems brought about by globalisation, technology and social media. Good luck to US democracy you will need it, and good luck to the rest of us who are living ever closer to a time of world war or potential nuclear war.

I watched the Joe Rogan / Musk podcast in its entirety and can see why they have the opinions they do on the progressive politics of the more extreme Democrats. But the extremists in that party are not a majority. You need to ask yourself also why the woke issues are being amplified and dominate the world's discourse and who is doing the amping and why. It is a point of failure and division in western society and the Russia/China-compromised social media engine is amping up the discourse around it to make us all fall out and get angry at our media, institutions, judiciary and government. Musk has his own valid personal reasons for switching side but it's mostly opportunistic... He sees an opportunity to get into government, pump up the value of Dogecoin and enact change which will favour his businesses. Trump and Musk are not going to be best friends, there's no substance to it. It's just a circle jerk thing. The trick is to fool the rest of us into thinking there's a genuine agreement and friendship that binds together all the people you mentioned prior. In fact, as the last Trump government shows they all hate each other and will barely last 2 months together, it will be like the Apprentice with a new firing every week just like it was in 2016-2020. Musk wants to wear many different hats at once... He is an environmentalist selling green cars. He is a MAGA guy and hangs out with the Murdochs and right wing mainstream media / press. He is a space rocket engineer and world's most clever guy, at the same time as buying a website for 44 billion and proceeding to destroy it, not a smart move really. He had an allegedly highly abusive upbringing and father, and has allegedly got some quite bad psychological issues because of it. And he clearly is an able talent and has an ability to get a lot out of his employees in terms of technology and achievement... but only because of huge government subsidies from NASA and the green car venture capitalism industry. He's a very complicated guy and so are his politics. But it's possible to judge someone not by their achievements but instead by the company they keep. And let's face it a mid-life crisis & divorce happens to the best of us. Wow really sticking it to the establishment there then. Men of the people! It will be right down once Trump and his team start to make material concrete decisions in government. How is the removal by force (with military involvement) all the undocumented workers from agriculture for example going to impact food prices and inflation? And a lot of these deportation victims will be well on their way to becoming valuable hard-working members of society with wives and husbands, families, jobs, paying tax... And Trump wants to end all those personal success stories before they've barely even got started. Is that what American is about now? Think about it. The threat to democracy was shared by both sides with both sides pointing the finger in the opposite direction. Can we have that discussion about democracy in 4 years when Trump has stitched up the entire judicial system in America, made himself a king above law and is holding Russian style elections for show? Pretty ironic you mention a "palace coup" when Trump had people literally storm the capital. They can choose who they want, it's their own party... yes a proper primary and much earlier dropping out for Biden would have worked much better for them in the end. It was all mishandled very badly. It's not about STARTING WARS it's about preventing them, that's what NATO and nuclear deterrence is about and as others have pointed out that's why we have American-backed security for other countries like Taiwan and why the UK and US work so closely together on intelligence and security matters. Trump is a trojan horse sent by Russia, North Korea and potentially other bad actors including allegedly China to weaken all of that security - for you in Australia included. No, America has a responsibility. They don't have the right to shy away from it under the guise of being all doveish all of a sudden. The impact on Afghanistan by withdrawing was horrific. Would you like to live under the Taliban? And why did we spend all those trillions of dollars and all those lost lives only to go and have that shitty outcome? It was a disgraceful decision by Trump, and bafflingly followed-through upon by Biden. The message we are sending to Taiwan at the moment is also very bad... That the security agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on. That is laughable man... NATO exists for there to be peace in Europe and the West. Are you suggesting that military collaboration between democratic countries is a BAD THING? Who will come to help out Australia or Japan if you are attacked by communist China? Are you going to defend yourself on your own? I don't think so.

Monumentally stupid. (And the source of all this is Elon Musk on X, you just happen to parrot it). It is simply insane to suggest that the current Republican party is now closer to the Clinton era democrats. They are not even remotely similar and not even close to the Bush era Republican party or even 1980s Reagan. The Republican party of the past is dead. If you think the likes of Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz, Laura Loomer and Tom Homan are the spiritual successor to Bill Clinton you want your fucking head examining. It just goes to show how little you know about politics outside of social media BS. By the way, the values you are labelling far-left are nothing of the sort... They are centre-left neoliberal policies, not socialism or communism. They are not even really that unusual, and come from people's well meaning intentions in lieu of being less racist. That's not to say everyone has to agree with them and that there aren't major practical issues in terms of the implementation of it. You are free to want less immigration, not more. You are free to want less affirmative action and wokeness. But for fucks sake get your facts right before making your mind up.

Honestly this shouldn't be too surprising when you look at how the Biden Administration behaved over the last four years, and when you consider the palace coup which took place to put in place Kamala Harris, and how the Democrat Machine just totally ignored the will of their own voters in mattering in the process. Biden was too old and so they switched to Harris as the candidate. No laws were broken, as the party is free to put whomever they want on the ballot. There should be some kind of age limit on political candidates as many of the most powerful politicians today are really old and of questionable mental fitness. Also a limit on how much a single person or company can donate to campaigns should be limited to make the donating more egalitarian rather than the rich people controlling everything. USA has gravely depleted its weapon stocks. USA needs to immediately stop sending hundreds of billions of arms to Ukraine, as all it is accomplishing at the moment is: 1) needlessly perpetuating yet more deaths of Ukrainian men (they truly are trying to take literally the saying "until the last Ukrainian", this is going to be a demographic disaster for post war Ukraine) & 2) running dry USA's own stocks which is putting at risk USA's own security should they need it for themselves. USA has only been spending only a few percent of their defense budget on Ukraine, and a lot of it has been used to give old weapons that have expired and needed to be replenished anyway (so most of the money was spent didn't actually go to Ukraine directly but to defense contractors in the USA, boosting domestic employment). Ukrainians know what it is like to live under Russian oppression and they'd rather die than experience that again. America has never been occupied, lucky for them. I think the West needs to stop giving Ukraine restrictions on arms use and let them fight as deep into Russia as Russia has attacked in Ukraine. Otherwise a fair border can never return as the fighting always continues only on Ukrainian territory, gradually demolishing what was. How much of that was due to "outsourcing security to the USA" vs being due to: 1) having a collective living memory of the recent horrors of WW1 & WW2, with zero desire whatsoever to repeat that under any circumstance 2) having ever close economic ties with each other now within Europe than ever before (the more you're trading with a country, the less likely you wish to go to war and ruin all that prosperity) The memory of war in Europe has faded and new generations do not remember it, and this can lead to selfish and indecent behavior towards other people. Those close economic ties can be severed. Populist leaders already lead the UK to leave the EU single market with a hard Brexit lying before the election that of course they wouldn't leave the single market. Similar things can happen in other European countries, e.g., France was close to being lead by a populist far-right Le Pen. Eventually the economic co-operation can end and result in a hot war among European countries. Right now it is only Russia who is trying to return to the 17th century of nation states fighting wars over land and looting property, but this kind of thinking could spread. Russia is supporting rightwing populist movements across Europe because they know that a divided Europe is a weak Europe. Unfortunately true, because no matter who the people elect to represet them in Washington DC, its "the establishment" (the unelected bureaucrats) who hold all the cards. The bureaucrats were nominated by elected representatives, and as some of them serve longer than one electoral cycle, they can have the positive effect of stabilizing the society against too rapid changes (the US government is always by one party and so there can be a zigzagging effect of one direction and then reversing the direction repeatedly, which is not productive over the long term). In foreign policy, consistency is very important to build trust with other countries. However, now there is the world's richest man who apparently is taking the role of a shadow president. He owns the most popular media platform and effectively can control a large part of how people think with changes to algorithms behind the scenes. In the US, if you have money, you can be untouchable, as Trump has shown, he is still a free man after 4000+ law suits. The terribly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan happened under the Biden Presidency. True, Biden did handle it badly, but before he took office, Trump threw the Afghan government under the bus by making a deal with the Taliban and releasing 5000 prisoners. The Afghan government never had a chance after that. NATO primarily existed to oppose the USSR, and the moment The Cold War ended then NATO itself should also have been wound down and abolished. Russia is allied with Iran and North Korea today and to some degree also with China, and combined those countries can be very powerful economically and they're spending a lot of money on military build-up. Russia is trying to re-occupy the previous parts of the Soviet Union including Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, and they're making threats that they will have a new world order from Vladivostok to Lisbon. I think NATO is needed today more than ever especially as Europe has cut its defense spending so much in the years since the cold war ended, people in many countries in Europe assumed that there would be peace and prosperity after the Soviet Union collapsed, but here they are again. Russia is testing where they can just take foreign land and resources. Now they're using threats about nuclear weapons use to prevent a fair defense.

"The data shows Democrats taking a sharp turn leftward on social issues over the past decade. This has distanced them from the median voter. Notably, the shift began in 2016. This suggests that Trump’s election radicalised the left, not the right." https://www.ft.com/content/73a1836d-0faa-4c84-b973-554e2ca3a227 The data does indeed show there has been a clear swing to the extreme left (but it happened even earlier than 2016), thus why I said that. It's now the Republicans who are closer to Democrats of the past (such as the era of Bill Clinton) than modern Democrats of 2024 are, who have abandoned what the Democrat Party used to be, leaving that ground instead to only Republicans to claim. If Democrats want to win elections again, they should look to reclaim this lost ground they've given away to the Republicans. But it might be a multiyear process to regain the trust of voters (as it's been a decade plus long swing away from the median voters the Democrat Party has been doing, you can't change that overnight), otherwise voters will just suspect politicians are doing what they usually do to voters: lying to them. (take for instance Kamala Harris suddenly trying to be "tough on the border" in the final weeks of the campaign, come on man, nobody is taking her seriously over that! It's just pure political spin, and not what she truly believes, in fact her doing that out of desperation just made her look even less authentic)

Let's not forget that many of these most prominent people who were on the other side to Kamala Harris and the Democrat Machine were people who had for most of their lives been Democrats (or at the very least liberal / Democrat leaning / voting), until that is the Democrats lurched to the extreme left, and left them behind: Joe Rogan, Tim Pool, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, Elon Musk, Dave Rubin, etc For all of these people to have called them "conservatives or right wingers" would have been flat out wrong for most of their lives. https://theconversation.com/the-intellectual-dark-web-just-won-the-election-meet-the-coalition-of-joe-rogan-rfk-jr-tulsi-gabbard-and-elon-musk-243380 The Dow Jones is still up a massive two thousand points since the election (nearly five percent) Let's not forget that democracy was also an issue too, and on this point the exit polling showed that Trump was beating Harris as the better candidate for people who cared about democracy: Honestly this shouldn't be too surprising when you look at how the Biden Administration behaved over the last four years, and when you consider the palace coup which took place to put in place Kamala Harris, and how the Democrat Machine just totally ignored the will of their own voters in mattering in the process. Exit polls are much more accurate than polling done prior to an election, which is why I was referring to that in my prior comment. People forget how unusual it was what Trump did! He was the first president since Jimmy Carter to not start a new war! Hopefully the next four years will in this particular matter, be the same as his first term of presidency. USA has been so eager to jump into new wars for so long, hopefully this is another trend that Trump can break, and maybe even end. Perhaps if after Trump's presidency if we can get elected someone such as say Tulsi Gabbard perhaps, then we could see another four years then eight year added on top of there being "no new wars". And we could see created a new normal, of USA not going to war every other second. A lack of new wars would also go a long way towards drying up new funding towards the military industrial complex. THIS. USA has gravely depleted its weapon stocks. USA needs to immediately stop sending hundreds of billions of arms to Ukraine, as all it is accomplishing at the moment is: 1) needlessly perpetuating yet more deaths of Ukrainian men (they truly are trying to take literally the saying "until the last Ukrainian", this is going to be a demographic disaster for post war Ukraine) & 2) running dry USA's own stocks which is putting at risk USA's own security should they need it for themselves. Although in the long run, the better approach is to onshore more of USA's critically strategic manufacturing. Which has been part of both this administration's plan, and a very major part of the incoming administration's plan as well. The terribly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan happened under the Biden Presidency. How much of that was due to "outsourcing security to the USA" vs being due to: 1) having a collective living memory of the recent horrors of WW1 & WW2, with zero desire whatsoever to repeat that under any circumstance 2) having ever close economic ties with each other now within Europe than ever before (the more you're trading with a country, the less likely you wish to go to war and ruin all that prosperity) Unfortunately true, because no matter who the people elect to represet them in Washington DC, its "the establishment" (the unelected bureaucrats) who hold all the cards. NATO primarily existed to oppose the USSR, and the moment The Cold War ended then NATO itself should also have been wound down and abolished. But unfortunately many people (such as the John Boltons, Victoria Nulands, and Dick Cheneys of the world) liked The Cold War, and wished that it never ended. And thus did everything in their powers to try and perpetuate The Cold War, to justify their existence and to keep the dollars $$$ rolling into the military industrial complex. In fact in their wet dreams they don't just want the old Cold War to carry on as a forever war, but they're even happy to see a hot war. And in Ukraine they're seeing those wishes play out as they wanted.

Yup, NZ is a must : ) In my heart since 2015 at least...

It looks promising! Everything looks sensibly laid out, more or less. I'd be extremely surprised if Fuji doesn't intend to follow up with a S35 version if this sells well. On a side note, the number of people on various sites who said "I would buy x camera if they put it in a cinema body!" and now turn around and say "it's just a lazily rehoused x camera" is truly mind boggling.

It is pretty easy to spot the bias in MSM if you still have your critical faculties about you. I haven’t read newspapers or watched TV since early 2000’s. So now when I ocassionally see coverage with my arguably obsolete frame of what objective reporting should be I can point out factual error, bias, and vested interests in seconds. But much like in advertisement the repetitive nature of installing fear and sowing divisiveness takes a hold when tuning in to it daily I’m sure. Glad most of the American people are seeing they have been fed bullshit this cycle. Talking to 50+ Uber drivers when I was over in the USA in 2017 after Trump won it struck me people just want to live their lives and have more in common than not on both sides of the aisle. Could in general not care less about which side wins as party positions have drastically shifted through the years. I’m a one issue pro bitcoin voter so I’d have voted Trump this time. And Dems will undoubtedly co-opt bitcoin in 4 years like nothing happened if it brings them to power again. Really curious to see what the UK stance will be towards Trumps policies. Pro bitcoin will keep London relevant as a financial center and move them further away from doomed centralizing hungry Europe - we’ll see. On a personal note as Dutch citizen facing new capital gains tax regulations and an exit tax possibly within 2 years I’m actively planning to emigrate the continent altogether. F that - sure as hell won’t be held financially hostage by my country of birth. I am voting with my feet 🦶

Just because the majority of voting Americas voted for Trump, does not make them conservatives or right wingers. Many of them simply voted against Harris, just as people voted against Trump in 2020. Picking the lesser of two evils is what it comes down to in American politics today and not some type of ideological victory as the media would have you believe. So when I encounter liberals - I happen to rent a room from one. When we actually talk about the issues, it turns out we have more in common as Americans than the media would have us believe. All these labels do is divide people... I'm pretty sure the hierarchy of needs is something like shelter, food, and sex rather than "believe what I believe or we can't work together to help each other get our common needs meet"... Ironically every day has now become "be kind to a liberal day" because the media completely lied to their base about the election forecast - no wonder people for Harris are upset about the election results - same thing happened on 2016. The situation is not people vs people - it is divide and profit by the media - it makes sick the brain washing the has taken over society. People are people and may the best film maker win regards of how they voted in an election, or what race or gender or creed they are. The facts is, it is the people against the media rather liberals against conservatives - what a deception - I happen to like pulp fiction and tropic thunder... great cinema is great cinema and great comedy is great comedy no matter who makes it and who is offends... The price of freedom is me allowing other's to express ideas that I don't agree with and other's allowing me to express ideas they don't agree with... hopefully the first amendment is practiced on this forum. ; )

For fuck's sake. I'm going to respond one more time to this stupid shit and then I'm done. I'll repost it again for the two genius experts who failed to read it the first time. Here is an entry on the wiki from a company who makes CMOS cameras talking about the overclocking options that exist for their camera, at least one of which is listed as potentially destabilizaing the camera. https://wiki.edgertronic.com/wiki/Overclock So, in the argument of "can you overclock a CMOS sensor," the answer is a simple "yes." Unless you can provide a specific piece of documentation from the manufacturer of CMOS sensors that says that "CMOS sensors cannot be overclocked in any way," then it's not worth continuing this discussion. Note that the above shit pasted from the "Hamamatsu company website" does not specifically say "you can not overclock a CMOS sensor." It does sound, though, like doing so would be different than overclocking a CCD. Again, provide actual hard evidence that counters the actual evidence that I have provided or stop making useless arguments.