amalcon

Trump can do whatever nobody will stop him from doing. Who's going to stop him from running again?

We're already past the point where there is no meaningful notion of "normal" that actually impacts what happens in government. Normalizing things doesn't matter that much if people care so little that they elect someone who's done what Trump did his first time.

It's most likely highly correlated, but not causative. That correlation still makes it diagnostically useful, which is how it's used here.

He's said to have done that by himself and some of his supporters. It's a lie, but they're saying it.

You'd get most Democrats to support voter ID if it came with a national ID card, plus an affirmative duty to some agency to ensure that everyone has access to one.

We have neither of those things. The closest we have is driver's licenses, because our culture is such that everyone eligible wants one. The only broadly available federal photo ID is the passport.

Requiring a driver's license, passport, or equivalent is unconstitutional, though. This is because even non-driver equivalents cost money in most places, making it an unconstitutional poll tax. That's why even the places with strict voter ID laws allow really strange forms of identification - they rely mostly on people not knowing this.

The military is similarly dominated by the other party. Somehow, we expect them to be professional. Professionalism here means to faithfully execute lawful orders even when a Democrat is in the white house. There were no personal loyalty tests for the military under Obama, or loyalty purges.

That went fine (in that the military did in fact follow lawful orders under Democratic presidents, not in that those orders were necessarily good). It also went fine for the civil service under Republican presidents other than Trump. There are a number of explanations for the difference in perceived (and possibly real) professionalism, which I will not try to speculate on here - but this is not a partisanship problem. It seems to be something specific to Trump-as-President.

I am somewhat weird among my peers in this respect: I invert Y on joystick controls only (and leave it as default for mouse controls). Probably there are other people who do this - it certainly makes sense to me - but almost everyone else (invert-Y or not) seems to find this odd when I actually discuss it.

It didn't super matter until I started using a steam deck, which has both joysticks and touchpads. I usually need to reverse one or the other in the steam controller mapping, since few games let you configure invert-Y separately for different input devices.

Do you have the same musical taste as your wife? I have a bone conduction headset that I use for cycling. Podcasts and ebooks sound fine, and some music is acceptable (a lot of classical, some pop and folk). Anything with bass just sounds like garbage though - don't bother with any hard rock, hip hop, or anything else with bass.

This is an important space to think about, it just doesn't seem to have much to do with your claim of a shift from making things to not making them, as part of the general evolution of the country. That shift has not been happening. We are still making as many things; they are just not always the same things and fewer people are involved in that making. Even the growth only had 2 major interruptions on the chart: the 2008 financial crisis and COVID. The former was caused by financialization leading to too much supply of certain kinds of housing, not too little manufacturing. The latter was a black swan event, which was exacerbated by general lack of preparation for that sort of thing more or less everywhere outside of China.

If your claim is that the west should look for ways to address Chinese manufacturing dominance, I actually agree entirely! That is something that will most likely require steps relatively soon. However, in my assessment, attempting to bring back masculine-coded manufacturing jobs (through any means I have seen seriously proposed) is likely to have the opposite of that effect. The biggest competitive advantage the US has in this area is the capital to build out the very sort of automation that is replacing these jobs -- and this kind of action would be giving up that advantage.

> The printing press, steam engine, cotton gin, combine tractor etc. all didn't kill traditional masculinity, so why should computers and robots?

This is an interesting space for discussion, and it's worth noting that I don't fully disagree with you here. However, I do think computers (and "robots", AKA machines with computers in them) are materially different than these other examples.

A combine harvester might allow one farmer to do the work of ten, but the thing that farmer is actually doing still shares a lot of similarities with what the farmer was doing before. Same with the cotton gin, the assembly line, or the table saw.

The printing press is special because it replaced what would today be a bunch of office jobs (scribes) with a single physical job. The latter would actually be more male coded in modern America.

On the other hand, something like the CNC lathe straight up replaces a large number if "machinist" jobs with some smaller number of programmers and CAD experts. These jobs are less masculine coded than machinist was. It also adds some computer knowledge to the requirements of the repair job. Even while we still approach true lights out manufacturing, the jobs "around" that machine are more supervisory in nature and less masculine coded.

It's not that the progression toward lights out manufacturing hasn't generated new jobs. It's generated plenty of them. It's just that a lot of these jobs are relatively gender neutral now, like product design and marketing. A lot of the masculine coded ones are driving based - delivery drivers, etc - which have already been undermined by the gig economy and are rife for further disruption by self driving cars once that gets good enough.

I agree that the solution needs to be a cultural shift of some kind. We aren't going to put computers back in the bottle. Executing a cultural shift is hard, but it's been done before: frankly, just look at all of the other (almost all positive) results of feminism since Susan B. Anthony's time.

It may not be better, but the space of responses to such a situation is totally different. Incentivizing manufacturing won't bring back manufacturing jobs, because the new jobs are at least as easy to replace with machines as the old ones. Banning the machines will just make your manufacturing uncompetitive internationally. Making labor cheap enough to compete with machines necessarily lowers living standards for laborers, which will get you overthrown.

If you want people to learn how to make things even when it's economically non-viable to do so, you need to explore a totally different solution space outside of private industry. E.g. encouraging maker hobbies, or subsidizing trade schools. Industry will always move toward automation as long as it is cheaper.

> A shift from making things to not making them, as part of general enervation of the country.

This is not the shift that is happening. US manufacturing is currently very close to the record levels from before COVID right now (similar to the 2008 levels): https://www.macrotrends.net/2583/industrial-production-histo...

The manufacturing jobs have been going away because of automation, not because the actual manufacturing is gone.

That's worse, though. It implies that 40% of the "electorate" was (in some combination) either prevented from voting or not bothered enough by the difference between plausible electoral outcomes to actually try to influence said outcome.

There are two scenarios here. In one, the AI bubble bursts (so Nvidia is overpriced now) and almost any value stock deal is good for them. In the other, it doesn't, and this gives them a limited hedge against problems with their most critical strategic partner (TSMC).

It looks like a good deal either way and in any amount. But of course I am no expert.

If you use single stream recycling for this, then this is actively bad. Plastic bags clog the sorting machines, and then get thrown out because (even if labeled) they are usually contaminated.

That's not the trick here. The trick is that the format of his talks - and the typical lack of preparation on the part of the typical college student - prohibits nuanced answers.

The correct answer there (to someone who, unlike me, does not believe in objective morality) is something like "I oppose everything Hitler did and stood for. Notwithstanding that, your question is incoherent." What unprepared 20 year old comes up with that on the spot? Much less be prepared to back it up, only in sound bites (because that's what works in the format)?

Exactly. It resembles the Brian Thompson murder in this way: there's a small minority who think it was a good thing. However, they are very vocal online. You probably don't know anyone who believes this in real life, but it's easy to find online because that minority is so noisy.

Meanwhile, there is a group who condemn this and all murders. They largely believe the offenders in these cases should be prosecuted to deter similar actions. However, they can't find much empathy for the particular victim. This group is significantly larger. Members of this group are sometimes mistaken for members of the former group because of that noise.

This is a weird criticism. Are meteorologists immoral? They are wrong a lot, with (occasionally) deadly consequences. It doesn't really hurt them - because their predictions are still pretty useful.

The problem is that, while I agree with more or less everything you say here - "writing off" approximately half the population is not going to work. You can't do that in a democracy, if only because that approximately-half actually have rather a lot of collective power. If they didn't, it wouldn't be much of a democracy.

My argument here isn't moral. It's that this class of strategy simply cannot be effective. I'm not claiming a better one, only that it's on all of us to look.

The thing that drives me nuts is that this is extremely similar to a corporate tax. By itself this is fine - I actually favor corporate taxes in at least some situations. The problems are:

- It is being imposed at least semi arbitrarily, which is obviously a massive corruption risk. You point out part of the risk, but there are other parts too.

- This administration both ran and executed on corporate tax cuts. Backdoor re-introducing a very similar thing does not give confidence.

If the policy was to take a stake in the S&P 500 or something, and it was not implemented by an administration that is otherwise leaning into corporate tax cuts, I would be basically fine with it.

This one kind of smells like Trump throwing a bone to the court and feeding his base's persecution complex. I highly doubt that he actually cares about flag burning. The court can rule against him here (answering the criticism that they always rule in Trump's favor). Then he can tell his people that the court is biased against him.

I'm not usually the kind of person to speculate about hidden motives like this. Frankly I think this kind of move is usually too uncertain to make sense. It could always just be one of his frequent semi-random actions like renaming the Gulf of Mexico. If I assume it's a considered action, though, I can't come up with another explanation for it.

The not-so-secret is that the "killer apps" for deep neural networks are not LLMs or diffusion models. Those are very useful, but the most valuable applications in this space are content recommendation and ad targeting. It's obvious how Meta can use those things.

The genAI stuff is likely part talent play (bring in good people with the hot field and they'll help with the boring one), part R&D play (innovations in genAI are frequently applicable to ad targeting), and part moonshot (if it really does pan out in the way boosters seem to think, monetization won't really be a problem).

The problem is that it's really hard to come up with a definition that includes all of the things we agree are obviously life (e.g. mold), does not include fire, and does not just appeal to the particular structure that most or all life on earth seems to have (the cell).

The result is a landscape of fuzzy definitions mostly centered around that last one.

Trump has already refused to admit electoral defeat. That line is much more important than the term limit, and our response was to elect him again.

Searle seems to have been right: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

(Not that I am the first to notice this either)

If anything, it would be even more so. If a person on the moon had a medical emergency, this would be a serious problem but there's another person there to help and/or fly the lander back to the capsule. If the person in the capsule had a medical emergency, it's hard to see how any of the crew survive.

More likely though, as you suggest, the same astronomical standards (pun intended) applied to all crew members.

I mean, the presumptive GOP primary candidates at the time were Trump, Trump-lite (DeSantis), about 10 Trump sycophants, and Haley. He had demonstrated a high level of influence over GOP primary voters in the 2022 midterm. It had been (internally) obvious since at least then that he was going to win the primary again. I can't speak to how much of that made it across the Atlantic.

Whether he would win the general was an open question then. In the American system, your prediction should never get very far from a coin flip a year out.

This is perhaps confounded somewhat by the fact that Trump's platform included mass layoffs of federal workers. Trump, contrary to past Republicans even, represented an existential threat to the livelihood of every federal worker.

We do have ductless AC in the US. It's technically a bit different but accomplishes the same thing using the same principles.

Of course, most of those systems are made by Japanese companies like Mitsubishi...

Erlang is kind of a special case, since there was that period when the community's preferred response to "too much politics" was to spam submissions about Erlang. Agreed though, it doesn't seem to have taken over more than (say) Bitcoin or Rust have at times.