darksaints

I have noticed certain groups where trans people are relatively over represented and group involvement more correlated with biological gender, but that’s not actually that interesting or meaningful in reality. Trans women having similar interests to men doesn’t make them men any more than me owning a gun makes me a Republican.

We have an electoral college that essentially disenfranchises any voter that is not voting with the majority unless your state is so close that it could be called a swing state. This affects red state democratic leaning voters just as much as blue state republican leaning voters…their votes are all worthless. For example, the state with the largest number of Trump voters is California, but none of their votes helped decide the election because California as a whole chose Kamala. And let’s not forget that we have one of the largest metropolitan areas and several territories that legally can’t vote for the president or have representation of any kind in the federal government.

A lot of people try to claim the popular vote as a measure of who won over the country’s opinion, but that’s simply not possible because the incentives and structure of the electoral college make it impossible to use as a measure of that.

The best we have for measuring who won over the hearts and minds of the country are polls. Polls are full of faults, but if executed correctly, they don’t disenfranchise by structurally underrepresenting entire classes of people. And the results of polling over the last hundred years suggest that Americans generally lean to the left of how our votes play out. You can call bullshit all you want on that, and there are very fair criticisms of polling as a measure of who would vote for what, but the fact of the matter is that the Republican Party knows this. That is why they oppose any attempt to get rid of the electoral college and also why they refuse to entertain enfranchisement of DC and US Territories. They know they’ll lose.

The trick that makes Martin so fast is not doing any geospatial processing, and just being focused on making quick, non-blocking requests to Postgres. All geospatial processing is done by PostGIS, which is essentially just using the C++ geos library (which is by far the most comprehensive and well optimized geospatial processing library).

The benchmarking repository has config files used for the test, and they did not use the tile cache feature.

I have that irresistible urge too, but I have to keep reminding myself that I could spend $2000 in credits over the course of a year, and get the performance and utility of a $40k server, with scalable capacity, and without any risk that that investment will be obsolete when Llama5 comes out.

Nothing you've said invalidates comparative advantage. It is just accepting a cost (reduced economic output) in favor of some strategic advantage. It doesn't matter if its a good idea, or a moral idea, or a strategic idea, the cost is still a loss in economic output.

This. There is no reason why any country should trust us anymore if entire trade relations can be destroyed by a presidential whim.

Even if Trump fell out of a window today and we got a pro-trade president tomorrow, we’re not fixing this damage for a very long time.

We probably would have to amend the constitution to insulate foreign policy from the whims of a single person if we want any chance of fixing this in our lifetime.

Good. Silicon Valley collectively sold their souls to Saudi Arabia, and put their full weight behind Trump because that’s what Saudi Arabia wanted, and now they are gonna get what they deserve. I hope their wealth is destroyed to the point of needing to care about Social Security and Medicare.

There are people (notably, Ha-Joon Chang) that have claimed that those protectionist policies have made South Korea more competitive, but I think you'd find a lot of economists disagree with that, and that South Korea become competitive in spite of those restrictions.

Keep in mind North Korea has had even stricter trade restrictions, and they don't have any functioning modern industry at all. Trade restrictions reduce export market size, insulate companies from competitive pressures, and those problems only serve to reduce capability, not increase it. Maybe there is some sort of happy medium of protectionist policies, but I've never seen any sort of framework for understanding how you could derive where that happy medium lies.

If trade restrictions only ever made countries more competitive, we wouldn't use them as a punishment.

> That requires some initial assumptions that simply aren't true.

There are certainly assumptions, but those assumptions are reasonable in nearly every possibly scenario the US has ever encountered.

> Tariffs can and do serve a vital role to protect a country from one with lower standards of living

Protect how? Protect them from lower priced goods? Sorry, but this "idea" originates from mercantilist thought and has been thoroughly dismantled and discredited. Even when one country is less wealthy and less productive, both countries benefit from expanded trade. This is Comparative Advantage...literally Econ 101.

Economics is a social science and has a lot of problems with things being claimed as settled science when they aren't, but this is actually one of them. You'd have a hard time finding any living economist, liberal or conservative, who would agree with you.

> (eg taken to an extreme, consider trade between county A where slavery is illegal and country B where it isn't)

I would hope that in this extreme, we wouldn't use tariffs as a tool, but rather full trade embargo. Because it stops being an economic argument, but rather a human rights argument.

Regardless, reducing or eliminating trade with nations that accept slavery would be a reduction in economic output. It would just be one with a price that we should be willing to pay.

I'd love to see any sort of human rights justification for Tariffs against Canada though.

The best (if not only) valid argument for tariffs is that they can be used to negotiate lower tariffs. Because tariffs only serve to reduce trade, which mathematically is suboptimal for economic output, and has been recognized as such by nearly every economist since David Ricardo.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump doesn't agree with that. Or his handlers don't. Not that the distinction matters anymore. The diplomatic and trade relations that we are destroying right now can't just be fixed by electing a new President. This is the US's Suez Crisis...we are no longer a world leader.

I'm completely convinced that F# (along with Scala, Haskell, and OCaml) adoption has stalled due to having ridiculously bad build systems. More significantly, they are being passed up in favor of Rust, which is a great language but nonetheless a bad fit for a lot of problem domains, simply because Rust has a superior build system. Hell, 80% of the reason I choose Rust over C++ for embedded work is because of the build system.

It baffles me that there are languages with non-profit foundations and are financially backed by multiple corporations which still have bad build systems. It is the most important investment you can make into a programming language.

Everywhere if you're looking. Of course that's just making America "great" again if you're brainwashed into the cult.

The US is on their second republic because the articles of confederation failed, and is looking down the barrel of a second dissolution as we speak. France is on their fifth republic, because the previous four republics failed. If France’s latest success is due to their people, wouldn’t that contradict their previous failures?

Sure, the people have an outsized influence on the success of a nation, but the institutions also shape the people and empower some people over others. Can you imagine how much differently the US would look if it wasn’t founded on slavery and oppression? If women didnt have to wait 150 years to vote? If we didn’t institutionalize a gerrymanderable legislative system?

The institutions matter AND people matter, but bad institutions empower terrible people.

Optical fiber is absolutely the simplest and best option for almost any form of long distance connectivity. Maybe this technology will become cost/performance competitive in about 15 years after the HFT firms have invested billions trying to extract an extra cent out of our financial markets.

You're in a cult.

Your opinion doesn’t matter dude. Decades of jurisprudence and Supreme Court precedent has already conclusively determined that green card holders have the same rights to free speech as citizens. It would take overturning the existing Supreme Court precedent, and destroying the 1st amendment along with it, for that to go away.

> forget what the law says if push came to shove you would be killed no questions which is fair if you think about it

Under no circumstances would any thinking person consider that fair.

Conditions for admissibility are one thing, and you can be denied entry for any thought crime that the government wants to impose.

Once you are in, you have the same rights to free speech as any citizen, and the same rights to due process as well. In fact, the only thing they can do to curb your free speech is prove in court that you lied on your application. Which is likely how this case will play out after judges rule on how illegal their attempted action is, but as of yet the government has not provided any evidence of him lying on his application.

Biden gave Trump way more leniency about improperly storing classified documents than he gave himself. Because trump didn’t merely improperly store those documents, he stole them and then hid them and then lied about their existence when questioned about them, and then refused to give them back when formally asked for them.

Stop pretending that Trump is the same as Democrats. He is in a league of criminality that he shares with his buddy Putin, and it’s way worse than any we have ever seen in the US.

I’m well aware. Read my other comments in this thread.

Promoting a terrorist organization is legal and well within the boundaries of free speech. It's just not cool, not a good look, and should be shamed into submission.

Providing material support to a terrorist organization is where it crosses into criminal territory.

Like most MAGAs, your ability to project false equivalence is unmatched. There were thousands of actual laws, passed by congress, on the books that prohibited the actions of January 6th protesters that were charged. Can you point to a single protestor that was charged that did not unlawfully enter the capitol building? There were thousands of people that were there protesting but never stepped foot in the capitol building. They were not charged. No MAGAts had their right to protest infringed on...they had unlawful entry, criminal tresspass, assault/battery, destruction of property, attempt to disrupt official proceedings, etc.

Mahmoud Khalil has broken no laws, at least according to the accusations of the government. He hasn't even demonstrated support for Hamas...and it wouldn't be illegal even if he did. All he has done is said something that some people don't like. That is not a crime.

That's why this is egregious, where J6 protest convictions are completely logical and morally consistent.

Nothing prohibiting advocacy of nazis, from what I can tell, it's for affiliation with nazis. And its an entry/approval requirement, and there is a big difference though between entry/approval requirements and ongoing obligations. The government can deny entry/approval for a myriad of reasons related to unfavorable speech, but they can't infringe on the legal speech of a green card holder.

Regardless, the prohibition for entry/approval is against people who were associated with the nazi party or nazi-allied parties between 1933 and 1945, which is basically obsolete already. Anybody for whom that prohibition applies would be 98+ years old now.

Could you show me where in those rules it says that you're not allowed to support Palestine? Or possibly somewhere in the rules where you forfeit your right to free speech?

I am neither OP nor a lawyer at all, but I do have experience watching authoritarian regimes destroy a country in real-time. One of the most terrifying things to me is the breakdown in the rule of law, because you no longer have any expectations to plan against, and anything can happen.

I would never counsel against getting legal advice, because competent legal advice is going to be one of your best assets for planning every possible future outcome. But I would caution you that in this environment, you also need to plan for what to do when the legal advice can no longer predict or inform outcomes.

The government cannot and will not show evidence of that because they can’t. The guy has actual self-published records of his speech which contradict all of the hysterical hearsay claims that the right is making against him. The current government has no interest in the truth, which is why they moved him to a state where his immigration attorney cannot practice.

Yes, there were and are plenty of protestors that actually support Hamas. Fuck those guys. But automatically claiming that if you support Palestine that you must support Hamas is the exact sort of childish intellectual laziness that leads to and supports actual genocide.

Green card holders have a right to free speech.

Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons, and the last 12 years are a testament to how bad of a mistake that was.

The only reason nuclear weapons are a thing is because of imperialism. Stay in your fucking borders and nobody gives a shit.

Russia is the reason why the west has nuclear weapons, and now the fascist US is reviving its imperial ambitions, with threats of annexation to Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Palestine. Sounds to me like the entire fucking world should be scrambling to become a nuclear power.