ShittyBeatlesFCPres @ ShittyBeatlesFCPres @lemmy.world

Posts

16

Comments

2,268

Joined

2 yr. ago

I stand corrected. Everyone listen to 👆that poster.

My state (Louisiana) has a different election system — actually several and it’s currently a confusing mess — and I’m not really familiar with Vermont’s primaries.

In Louisiana, the November election is actually technically a primary. If no one gets 50%, the top two candidates (regardless of party) have a run-off in December. For various reasons over the years, some elections were changed to be more like first past the post with closed party primaries. Others weren’t. And now, it’s just a messy hodgepodge. (And to top it all off, our governor and many other elections are “off-year” so it doesn’t align with federal elections. We’re voting on Amendments on March 29th. It’s idiotic.)

I don’t know if this counts as a conspiracy theory but I kind of suspect the story of the Vision Pro was that it was originally a real project focused as much on patents as anything. If they wanted a viable consumer product line, they’d have sold the 1st generation(s) at a loss to help an app ecosystem flourish and compete with other XR products (even if an Apple’s XR headset would still cost $500 more because Apple).

The US military was calling for XR headsets and even evaluated HoloLens. Companies were obviously exploring too. That’s when Vision Pro was under development. Apple isn’t really a military contractor — I’m not sure if they do any — but having patents to license to future XR headsets could potentially be very valuable and subsidize Vision Pro consumer pricing until the component prices fell.

Then, HoloLens shit the bed. It made soldiers nauseous and the military (and companies) pretty much lost interest in XR. The entire HoloLens team got laid off. By then, the Vision Pro was probably in early production but the potential revenue from having the most advanced XR’s patents became essentially nil. So, they just sold them at the actual cost and gave up on the product line.

In that scenario, the Vision Pro lead (and team) delivered exactly what Tim Apple wanted but the revenue potential disappeared. Meanwhile, “A.I. Siri” continued to suck (except the new animation; props to that team). So, the Vision Pro management was rewarded even if the Vision Pro failed in the market.

They kind of are in a different party: the Democratic Socialists of America isn’t on the ballot but Bernie runs as an independent who caucuses with Democrats. If Democrats wanted to, they could run a candidate against him. But to form a truly independent third party, you’d just be splitting the votes on the left.

As you get to state and national elections where much of the nation is pretty evenly divided, running as a third party all but ensures the Republican will win (even without winning a majority in most states, though a few use different systems). In essence, our system requires coalitions to be made before the election rather than after.

You could compare it to UK elections. In 2024, Labour won 33% of the votes but won 411 of 650 seats because the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and regional parties split the rest.

I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish. I’m all for breaking up tech monopolies but both of those projects are mostly open source that get proprietary Google crap and (for Android, at least, some monopolistic behavior like requiring what’s preinstalled, which is fine to ban).

I don’t work on ad-supported projects so I may be out of my element but it seems like what would actually help end the monopolistic behavior is requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses. The monopoly problem isn’t Chromium or AOSP or that Google runs ad-supported search. It’s that if [insert random site] wants ads, they typically use AdSense. If Facebook and Google want to run ad-supported services, fine. But they shouldn’t also also be the middlemen for advertisers who want to run ads on third party sites. That’s a recipe for monopolistic behavior.

In my ideal world, there would be no targeted ads at all and advertisers had to sponsor — and were so partly responsible for — the specific content they want to be associated with. But that probably isn’t going to happen since every politician is an advertiser that wants to launder their sponsorships through a middleman.

Well, Putin’s demands also include Ukraine ceding additional land — land not controlled by Russian forces — that are mineral rich so…

This is the easiest bluff to call in history. Pissing off every retired person in America is how you lose a landslide election but even if you think there won’t be elections anymore, pissed off retired people will find a way to make your life miserable.

Just because he’s a clueless fool with connections who hasn’t invented anything (except maybe a truck where the sides fall off) doesn’t mean he’s not a “technologist.” He’s just as smart as smart as every other “effective altruist” or “networked state” moron.

You may be too young but remember when AOL had a highly paid “Digital Prophet” who was about as close to an actual clown as you could get without floppy clown shoes?

For the record, the network state movement means “seceding from the union.” And it won’t go any better for them than when Seasteading enthusiasts found out pirates exist.

Almost every FedSoc judge has connections to Leonard Leo and has probably gone to one those creepy Bohemian Grove retreats that was already creepy like a century ago. They can’t all recuse themselves or we’d have a democracy.

Not the female judges, of course. No women allowed at Bohemian Grove retreats — maybe some trafficked teens but no grown women. Grown women would probably react like how younger generations of men quietly changing clothes in gym locker room react when a creepy old man drying his saggy old balls on a bench makes direct eye contact and asks you a question.

The federal Education Department is a very small department. It’s basically the college student aid program and (typically) non-controversial and often universal grants to state and local governments for K-12 stuff (like special education).

At major D-I schools, “revenue sports” like football, basketball (men’s and women’s nowadays but much smaller than football), and sometimes baseball or a random other sport turns a profit and funds the athletic department along with donors. Sometimes, there’s an “athletics fee” students pay that (ideally) funds things for a gym and intramural sports.

But generally, it’s donors. And college presidents keep sports around to advertise the school and keep alumni attached so they donate. A rich alumnus might not donate to sports but the college president wines and dines them at a football game.

Specialized A.I. (like Alphafold from Deepmind) is amazing. I mostly just think consumer-level generative A.I. that tries to do everything will probably suck for awhile.

Which I guess is basically like human intelligence if that’s how you’re measuring it. I can go to any bar and find someone confidently wrong 60% of the time. And you can win a Nobel Prize and not really know how to invest the award money competently.

In normal times, I’d say it’s complicated. There’s a lot of suburban parents who are busy and tune out the news but get very politically activated if you start fucking with schools (and student aid because that’s fucking with their money).

Not sure if MAGA cares — I don’t know if we’ll even have elections — but don’t underestimate parents to be late to the fight but then want to gouge out a politician’s eyes.

I think the practical problems with this are going to be weird. The federal Department of Education is pretty small and doesn’t set as much policy as people assume since that’s 90% done at the state and local level. The college student loan program is a huge component and could theoretically be ruined or just moved to Treasury or HHS or whatever.

The rest is mostly grants to state and local governments and red state politicians are going to be even more pissed than blue if they kill those and put a hole in their budget that has to be filled. (Doesn’t mean they won’t do it but it’s not going to please any governors/legislators.)

The people who will likely suffer most are special ed students since those grants are, obviously, for public schools and private/parochial schools basically never have programs for students with severe, profound, or mild autism. (I don’t know the current terms but when I was in high school, people with, for instance, autism were classified as severe, profound, mild, or moderate based on where they fell on the spectrum. Those terms are probably outdated or were unique to my school system.)

You can use any shape you want. The rest is idiotic but you can get crazy with the shape if you want.

Does Tesla use dealerships in Canada? In the U.S., they don’t. They have showrooms owned by the company itself and you order online. My state requires dealerships¹ and just have service centers here.

¹ It’s a wildly antiquated law. When cars first came out, states passed laws requiring dealerships to guarantee the car companies could service the vehicles. Those laws are still on the books basically because car dealership owners are generally rich people who buy state legislatures. (And there’s a shocking amount who are state legislators.)

The actual law says:

Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.

It seems like a plain reading of the text says it requires an invasion by a “foreign nation or government.” I don’t know how lawyer-brained you have to be to read that as “Oh, and also some Venezuelan gang counts as a foreign nation or government if the president says so.”

He’s not the first or last person to throw away a promising career to make a shitty, embarrassing podcast.

Is there confusion? From what I’ve read, Ukraine agreed to the partial cease fire and Russia didn’t. Russia was fine with including the terms of the partial cease fire but made absurd additional demands that were essentially a poison pill to force Ukraine to reject the counteroffer. That means there never was a cease fire agreement.

Party registration is public data in Arizona. They provide a ton of data, actually. A lot of states just provide name and party affiliation and maybe zip code or whatever. But you can often just buy it.

If they required people to RSVP, it’d probably be pretty easy for a political party to cross reference and check ID. (It seems Arizona sells the list to political parties and mere citizens have the right to inspect the voter rolls. Whatever that means.)

Source: https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/access-to-and-use-of-voter-registration-lists

Because basically everything in the Democratic Party is fundraising and seniority now and he represents NY and has for years. The way you advance within the Democratic Party is fundraising. So, leadership almost inevitably represents NYC, San Francisco, LA, etc. If you can have a fundraiser with guests from Hollywood, Wall Street, or Silicon Valley, it’s pretty easy to be one of the top Democratic fundraisers.

The only other ways to match that are basically: be independently wealthy, have an unusual level of celebrity and a national profile (like AOC), or be the chair of the appropriations or finance committee or something similarly powerful. There’s no official rule about it but traditionally, Democrats assign committee positions by seniority. So, you get a bunch of out-of-touch old people running powerful committees and easy-to-caricature coastal elites as the main faces of the party in Congress. (Republicans have 6-year term limits for committee leadership and fewer norms around seniority.)

Republicans obviously don’t have fundraising issues since the FEC doesn’t enforce election laws and they have billionaires on their side. Super PACs legally aren’t allowed to coordinate with the campaigns but, of course, Elon Musk, who setup and funded the biggest Super PAC, literally made campaign appearances with Trump and crashed at Mar-a-Lago for awhile. Of course they fucking coordinated.

Congressional votes are the end of the road and accepting excuses is a vote for fascism at the moment. Schumer has no business being in office and it was clear when he said he votes based on imaginary people from Long Island. I don’t care how much money he can raise if he betrays everything I care about.