booly @ booly @sh.itjust.works

Posts

2

Comments

489

Joined

2 yr. ago

Back from Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied

I think people paying attention to national politics but not necessarily state level stuff don't realize just how impressive Andy Beshear has been. In 2024, Trump won Kentucky 65% to 34%, more than 30-point lead. In 2020, Trump won the state 62% to 36%.

And through that, during the Trump era, he has campaigned on unabashedly progressive policy positions (marriage equality, abortion, universal pre-k, renewable energy and EV production, legalizing marijuana), and won statewide elections in 2015, 2019, and 2023.

In many ways, the 2023 win was the most impressive, because that was when the Democrat brand was getting dragged down, and incumbents in that era tended to have a bit of a post-covid drop in the polling numbers.

People like Andy are who we need in politics: unafraid to vote his conscience, and using that charisma and voice to bring the public along to support those things.

(that's bad)

The conversion therapy contains potassium benzoate.

They're basically the proto Pacific Islanders. It's believed that their civilizations all trace back to a group of people from the island of Taiwan/Formosa, who learned how to sail over the deep ocean and set up new communities, bringing chickens, pigs, taro, coconuts.

They settled modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, as far west as Madagascar, to Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, and most of the other Pacific Islands, as far east as Easter Island. Native Hawaiians, Samoans, Guamese, etc., are all Austronesian. Most ethnic groups considered native to these islands trace back to Austronesian expansion.

There are shared linguistic and cultural ties that showed that they had recent comment ancestry, that has since been confirmed by DNA genealogy.

It's not a kill switch, but a "stay alive" switch that can only be pressed by the United States, and needs to be pressed every year.

Nearly half of U.S. adults

Half of LLM users (49%)

No, about a quarter of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are. Only about half of adults are LLM users, and only about half of those users think that.

She said this measure would have given her officers more leeway to make arrests during the neo-Nazi rally.

Isn't this just an acknowledgement that the mask wearers weren't breaking any law, but the Sheriff just really wanted to arrest them for some reason?

I love that the question doesn't specify what "better" means, and we're all interpreting it in our own ways. Healthier? More enjoyable?

We’re saying the same thing.

I read your comment to say "the only thing stopping the kill switch is rules," when I'm pointing out that "the only thing constituting a kill switch is rules," and those are two distinct ideas that have different implications.

So is there a point where he loses everything? If Tesla drops too low, can they call in the debt?

Yes, to whatever extent that Elon-owned stock is pledged as collateral for his personal loans. Loans like that always carry provisions where the lender can call in the collateral if the value drops to a certain ratio of the overall loan balance.

So if Tesla stock plunges enough (and we have no way of knowing exactly how much is enough), that can cascade to where Elon needs to put up some cash, or other property, or pledge more shares, or it all comes crashing down where his collateral gets wiped out at the bottom.

So, the only thing stopping this “myth” from becoming reality is a set of rules, not a physical obstacle or technical limitation.

No, I think you've got it backwards.

There's no technical or electronic or mechanical kill switch. The method of limiting the use of the aircraft is entirely contractual agreements between the nations, telling the partners that they're not allowed to modify or test the aircraft without U.S. approval.

In other words, the kill switch itself is nothing but a set of rules, not a physical obstacle or technical limitation.

Am I crazy or are the comments in this thread all about different ages? Well, I'll defend the existence of children's music.

Children's music is great for teaching young children (under the age of 2) the basics of music. A clear melody (often in C major), simple rhythm, some basic song structure, rhyming lyrics, and lots and lots of repetition gets children listening and singing at an age before they can form coherent sentences. These are skills they learn to encourage not just later composition and performance of music, but also basic human functions like speaking and listening.

They're doing it with their books, their TV shows, and their games, too. Developmentally appropriate material is important for learning that category of art or culture, and provides a basis to build on after that.

No.

Autocracy moves faster at marshaling the resources it has, but is significantly worse at accumulating resources than what economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson describes as inclusive political and economic institutions, which broadly allow members of the public to engage in political and economic activity. (Note that their work on these things won them the Economics Nobel last year.)

Distributed, decentralized power is important for maximizing the potential of a population.

Autocratic political systems are brittle. They're also poor. They tend not to survive more than a decade or two before the strongman is deposed, one way or another, whether from internal coup or revolution, or simply external invasion of a weakened state. And a successor strongman might be weaker. All the while, the inclusive states continue to grow in their own power and influence.

So any short term gain in consolidating power into smaller groups is going to be up against time, and the fragility of the whole arrangement as the autocratic country falls behind its competition.

Actually for federal sentencing, property destruction is punished under the same table as theft. It's mostly measured from the amount of loss to the victims, whether the person actually profited from it or not.

"Up to 10 years" is the maximum possible for that type of crime. Actual sentencing guidelines for a $500k loss for a first time offender will probably come out to about 2, maybe 3 years.

In order for the recommended sentence to hit 10 years, we'd have to be talking about damage of over $550 million, or something like a long criminal history.

Substantial disruption of critical infrastructure would get someone to around 5 years, as a reference.

Slim Charles, one of the Barksdale enforcers from The Wire.

In 2024.

Helpfully highlighting the baseline so that we can see how much it changes over time.

The merits of lump sum versus annuity aside, the point is that the headline number comes from a naive total of how many payments are made in the annuity option. So when it's listed as a $2 billion jackpot, it's actually worth something closer to half of that as a lump sum.

That wouldn't work to reduce lottery taxes. The lottery itself isn't return on investment in stocks or whatever, and can't be held indefinitely the way an appreciating stock can.