BryantD

I don't think you're wrong. Every time someone says we can't do high speed rail it makes me very sad. And as far as Seattle goes... my commute is substantially affected by the I-5 closures. It's somewhat shocking to me that we allow infrastructure to decay as much as we do.

I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(

a) Risk vs. reward -- not that I'm saying we're making the right balance decisions, but the correct speed depends on that balance in general.

b) The current administration is extremely unlikely to make vaccine approvals faster. If anything their instincts are the other way around.

Also in Good Will Hunting, when Will (Matt Damon) delivers a scathing job rejection to the NSA.

1997. The War on Terror has a lot to answer for.

https://youtu.be/tH0bTpwQL7U

How annoying. I am not a Less Wrong reader so I have no particular insight here.

That literal spiral pattern keeps popping up, often around instances of AI psychosis: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-o...

(I'm not endorsing any of that article's conclusions, but it's a good overview of the pattern.)

The bit about purchased stars and followers is a bit out of left field. Is there a piece of news I missed?

Thanks for the more detailed analysis — you clearly have better visibility into specifics than I do as an outsider. I sincerely appreciate the follow up and I agree that the economics should be examined.

I still think there’s value to encouraging the arts that isn’t purely financial, but I don’t think there’s an easy way to answer yes to your last question.

Sorry, but what exactly makes you say that artists aren't working poor?

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds a bit like you've got a pre-existing opinion of the value of artists vs. however you're defining working poor.

All true, but let's not lose track of relative costs.

The income program provides €33,800,000 a year (2000 participants, €325 a week, 52 weeks in a year). Double that to account for cost of managing the program -- that seems too high to me, but I want to err on the side of caution for this analysis.

Some percentage of that money flows right back into the economy, of course.

Meanwhile, ignoring windfall corporate taxes, Ireland ran a €7.4 billion deficit in 2025. So the cost of the program, ignoring the money flowing back into the economy, is under half a percentage point of the budget? Those small amounts do add up, but I can't see this as relevant competition to the cost of shoring up health, housing, and transport. I don't have good estimates of how much those costs are, which is why I'm using the deficit as a relevant proxy, but still -- we ought to avoid the trap of seeing numbers which are large to you and me and forgetting that other numbers are larger by orders of magnitude. (There's a term for this which slips my mind.)

I don't think that being able to support a family of three in Ireland is particularly a sign that society doesn't value your work. If she had to pay income tax, perhaps she'd only be able to support herself -- but if you think everyone in Ireland who only makes enough money to support themselves is doing not particularly valuable work, I think it's worth considering the implications of that.

I have thoughts on how we're defining value as well, but others have covered those.

Ireland has already provided substantial benefits to artists — income from art is exempt from income tax up to a certain level. Society has not disintegrated. Speculation and anecdotes are not terribly useful but my Irish author friend is not from a rich family, nor is she well-off, but she’s able to support her husband and child in a smaller Irish city by dint of writing several books a year and stressing a lot. I don’t think it would be possible without the tax exemption.

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/money-and-tax/tax/inco...

How do you manage to have conversations with people in your day to day life with so much assuming negative intent? Some people treat these little linguistic excursions as ways to achieve common understanding, rather than as a sporting event with winners and losers, you know.

What you can do if you're uncertain -- and my language was sloppy, good point! -- is say "hey, I'm not sure what you meant here; can you clarify?" And I say "yeah, I was unclear. I meant that the question was related to treaty status but after digging in, it's not required by treaty for that elected position to only be occupied by someone of a specific heritage. Thank you for pointing that out."

(I might not have said thank you, to be honest, and of course you're welcome to assume I'm just covering up because you called me on the phrasing.)

Hey, try not to lie too obviously. I explicitly said "not a treaty matter," and I explicitly said I didn't necessarily agree with the decision.

Not that anyone's reading this but what a great example of the tired old trick of attempting to use social justice language as a rhetorical lever.

Look at all those details omitted!

This was an indigenous people treaty case, and when mothballed says "certain public elections" they mean "a single election for a position in Hawaii which was established in negotiations with indigenous Hawaiians in the 1970s. Not, however, a treaty obligation.

I don't know that I agree with RGB here, but I don't find that to be a racist opinion.

The link to the story in the linked article is wrong; here's the current one: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...

Citizenship or lawful status, sorry! And you’re right.

But it’s totemic when you dig into conspiracy theories about undocumented immigrants voting. RealID comes up a lot.

I am only guessing but I'd be surprised if it was a money grab. My instinct is that it's a way of highlighting RealID citizenship verification.

You don't have to read this comment, I'm just throwing down a marker for myself.

I think this is a good policy direction. I don't like the rhetoric and I understand that this as much a political decision as anything else, but I'm glad to see it regardless. A year from now if someone says "you reflexively oppose anything Trump's administration does," I'll have this to look back on.

(Shoes at TSA checkpoints too, btw.)

They are not. Many people are doing this; I don't think there's enough data to say "most," but there's at least anecdotal discussions of people buying Mac minis for the purpose. I know someone who's running it on a spare Mac mini (but it has Internet access and some credentials, so...).

The blogger who wrote the linked post is a white supremacist who explicitly supports eugenics. His stock in trade is pseudoscience. This particular post is an attempt to get people thinking he’s clever before they get to the racist bits — look at the cool dental things we learned! It is not surprising that he was shoddy here; he’s always shoddy.

This is somewhat blunt but like a lot of these schmucks, he relies on people being polite. I see no reason to play along.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/cremieux-jordan... for more.

The guy who thinks African heritage is fundamentally inferior to European heritage is sloppy about his science writing! Not a surprise, alas.

Somewhere far away, Eric Raymond is explaining that "Apple’s hopes of retaining market share above 10% will vanish."

As far as I know there is no link between, say, talk.bizarre and weird Twitter, but it's a sign that the same basic impulses are universal. I'm sure that in 1776, a few dedicated oddballs were creating snarky weird in-jokes on broadsides that nobody read except them.

If you're a cinema person, I strongly recommend Agnes Varda's documentary on LA street art at the end of the 1970s, Mur Murs. (That's a pun: murals as an expression of the murmurs of the community.) It takes graffiti as an expression of ownership as the central thesis and I found it really lovely. Thanks for this comment.

As always, claims like this should come with the WARN Act notice record. There's only been one notice in NYC in 2026 (visible at https://dol.ny.gov/warn-dashboard) and it's not Vimeo or Bending Spoons. I don't see one in Q4 2025, either.

Unsurprisingly, Tchaikovsky is a tabletop gamer and his first series, Shadows of the Apt, was derived from a game he GMed in college.

And I agree, everything hes written has been worth reading.

This isn’t completely the answer to what you want but skills do open a lot of doors here. Anything you can do on a command line can turn into a skill, after all.

Yeah, it was like this (except not petabytes).

Back in the day, if you loaded a page from the web archive that wasn’t in cache, it’d tell you to come back in a couple of minutes. If it was in cache, it was reasonably speedy.

Cache in this case was the hard drives. If I recall correctly, we were using SAM-FS, which worked fairly well for the purpose even though it was slow as dirt —- we could effectively mount the tape drive on Solaris servers, and access the file system transparently.

Things have gotten better. I’m not sure if there were better affordable options in the late 1990s, though. I went from Alexa/IA to AltaVista, which solved the problem of storing web crawl data by being owned by DEC and installing dozens of refrigerator sized Alpha servers. Not an option open to Alexa/IA.

They have come a very long way since the late 1990s when I was working there as a sysadmin and the data center was a couple of racks plus a tape robot in a back room of the Presidio office with an alarmingly slanted floor. The tape robot vendor had to come out and recalibrate the tape drives more often than I might have wanted.