OK, what the hell? I originally just passed by the post thinking you were joking, but now I'm realizing I'd never asked what the "Scotch" in "butterscotch" was. Does the Scotch choice make diff in the flavor? Does the Laphroaig make it peaty?

True, but googling at least gave you the ability to evaluate sources, which if you don't already know something about the material is a useful thing. With LLMs you simply don't know what the training set was, so you lose that potential insight.

And unrepentant tankie . . .

As far as I know, all the old AT&T/Lucent and NT gear was absorbed by the firms who bought those outfits. And yeah, telcos have people on staff to maintain that stuff, along with parts stockpiles. I'd guess that the Tandem non-stops that did the CO CDR collection have been replaced by now

He is not terribly bright, and never has been.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peachoid

Look, we seem to be talking past each other, so I'll leave it at this:

IMO, the dems poorly executed a badly thought out strategy, and in my world people are pissed at leadership for the pain this caused. You seem to want excuse them, which is your right, but I do not.

The reporting was, in fact, that Schumer and the rest of the leadership were convinced that the Dems would get the blame, despite the current evidence that the public is (or was) blaming the GOP.

The consultant bit was that t it just smells like a consultant-y take.

How about: the ACA strategy was not sufficiently gamed out, and people are furious with them for pushing a strategy that was destined to lose given the way they played it?

And to your statement that we can't go back to 9/30, you are correct, and we are considerably worse off for it. Dem leadership misread the GOP, misread the public, and made sure that the next fight will be even harder if they are even willing to try.

My point is that if they weren't willing to keep pressure, if they themselves did not have concrete goals and all it took was some consultants telling them they might look bad later, even when the GOP was being blamed, they should have never put people through the wringer in the first place.

Nice slippery slope. I did not propose the scenario, the Dem leadership undertook a set of actions with full knowledge about how the other side would react, and caved anyway. They could have kept pressure on through Thanksgiving, and failing that, generate decent messaging instead of this panic.

It doesn't feel like you are really asking. The stated goal was preserving the subsidies, permanently or (later) temporarily. Dem leadership defined the "acceptable deal" and then caved. You are asking me to define an outcome, but taking off the only one they put up.

Real harm is being done regardless of the shutdown, and if the will to continue pressure wasn't there, they should have have just shrugged and passed the CR 40 days ago. This was additional pain not just for no gain, but a loss.

Since that was the actual, stated goal, it wasn't me who was delusional. But since you asked, I'd say that anything that didn't look like a leadership engineered capitulation geared toward saving their Thanksgiving break and satisfying some corporate donors.

I'm going to guess it smells like ass and tastes worse.

West Point grad. He started as 2nd lieutenant, made Captain. Don't know if he wanted out or just wasn't promotion material.