nednobbins @ nednobbins @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

As a multi-national, multi-ethnic, mutt, I am too.

Given that part of my mutt-makeup is Austrian, I'm offended that Austria and our northern neighbor have greatly contributed to this. Our deserved guilt over the Holocaust blinded us to decade after decade of human rights abuses by Israel.

We've seen this coming for a long time and, as a taxpaying contributor to the biggest funder of Israel, I'm ashamed.

There is already a foolproof method that is immune to any abuse of trust by admins; create an alt account.

Maybe. "Allowed" suggested that they wanted or welcomed it.

A bunch of formerly powerful people in the Republican party are now much less powerful. Many of them have been sidelined in the Republican party and replaced. Several prominent former Republicans have effectively switched to the Democrats.

The Republicans and Democrats have differences in how they structure their organizations but neither one wants to intentionally allow outsiders to take over.

Maybe. I think it's more likely that she truly believed that her milquetoast approach was actually the safer option. I'm not even sure Harris was exceptionally cowardly.

Many other people would likely have folded and taken that "safe" option.

The problem is that we needed someone who went well beyond just "not cowardice". We needed an actual hero. We needed a candidate who was willing to boldly face down big money interests, even when it seemed unwise and hopeless. Harris definitely wasn't that hero.

Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with "de-duping" as a database operation either.

The main components would probably be:

1. Decide on a new scheme (with more digits)
2. Create a mapping from the old scheme to the new scheme. (that's where existing duplicates would get removed)
3. Let people use both during some transition period, after which the old one isn't valid any more.
4. Decide when you're going to stop issuing old SSNs and only issue new ones to people born after some date.

There's a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on "de-duped" databases.

The Democratic party, as it stands, is dead and the Greens are stillborn.

There's nothing but hopes and prayers to support the idea that the Greens will ever get anywhere in the US. They have neither a policy platform nor any individuals who inspire broad support.

It is absolutely possible to take over parties from within though. We've seen it happen twice with the Republicans. They tried, and failed, to keep the Tea Party from taking over. Then they tried, and failed, to keep Trump from taking over.

History suggests we have a better chance getting AOC to take over and clean house with the Democrats than we do waiting for the Greens to make any headway.

I agree. Her speech on the Monday after she got picked was great. She came out of the gate swinging. She laid out a solid initial vision with a realistic warning that it was going to be a hard fight.

Then she didn't.

Somewhere along the line she got cold feet and decided that not rocking the boat would be a safe option. She thought that pushing too hard would galvanize her opponents. Instead she tried to play nice with them and alienated large chunks of her base.

Harris raised 50% more than Trump. It’s hard to pin this one solely on big money influence.

I think that’s the point of this tour. He isn’t running for president. He’s trying to build a support base for a real alternative.

That’s presumably AOC but it’s still too early.

It’s so basic that documentation is completely unnecessary.

“De-duping” could mean multiple things, depending on what you mean by “duplicate”.

It could mean that the entire row of some table is the same. But that has nothing to do with the kind of fraud he’s talking about. Two people with the same SSN but different names wouldn’t be duplicates by that definition, so “de-duping” wouldn’t remove it.

It can also mean that a certain value shows up more than once (eg just the SSN). But that’s something you often want in database systems. A transaction log of SSN contributions would likely have that SSN repeated hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with fraud, it’s just how you record that the same account has multiple contributions.

A database system as large as the SSA has needs to deal with all kinds of variations in data (misspellings, abbreviations, moves, siblings, common names, etc). Something as simplistic as “no dupes anywhere” would break immediately.

There might be some advantage in electability advantage for old white guys but the outcome doesn't really seem worth the effort.

AOC would certainly have a bunch of biases to overcome but from everything I can see, she would be a great leader. She seems to have a solid understanding of many spheres including economics, international relations, people, politics, marketing and more. She also seems to prioritize the good of the people over her own power or pocketbook.

She might be harder to get in but it's absurd to dismiss her as a clown.

Ah. Now I understand. I think those people prefer more naked propaganda like “American Sniper” though.

We might be talking about different things. I’m just saying that Starship Troopers is an anti-war film and most of the people who like it are fairly liberal.

Can you elaborate? She had made some inflammatory comments in the past but in the past few months she seems to be the poster child of maturity and determination.

I get what you mean but Starship Troopers is a critique of war and militarized states.

When I use LLMs for search, I always ask for sources and then follow up.

Interesting.

It looks like that's been changed since the NPR broadcast.

https://redstagfulfillment.com/universal-postal-union-treaty/

Nobody builds cars under slave like conditions. It’s just not possible. Modern car factories are highly automated plants that require skilled operators. In the case of the VW Xinjiang, that was QC inspectors. There’s no way a hole in the wall car factory using outdated labor practices can come close to competing against modern production.

Africa has a number of factors in its favor that make it a potential economic powerhouse. It has some of the largest natural resource reserves in the world, it has a huge population, it's conveniently located on or near several important trade routes.

It's also cursed with some pretty bad natural infrastructure. The rivers in Africa don't provide good access between the center of the continent and the coasts.

China had about the same GDP a Sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990's https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=1996&locations=CN-ZG&most_recent_value_desc=true&start=1960 It's taken China 35 years to get from there to it's current spot as 2nd largest economy in the world. And that was for an economy that was growing at nearly 2x the rate of the rest of the world for most of that period. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=CN-1W

That's not to say that Africa can't become an economic powerhouse but it will take a lot of work and time. It would take sustained investment and reinvestment in Africa over several decades.

Because the human brain doesn't intuitively count the way we're taught in school.

Our brains are very good at understanding 1, 2, sometimes 3 and, "many". That's the data we get from smart chips, young children and isolated pre-literate societies.

Counting bigger numbers requires abstract systems. Our brains can do that but it's much harder and we don't grasp it as well.

The practical offshot of this is that while it's intuitively obvious that a small space like a garage will quickly fill up with toxic gasses, it's far less intuitive that a "very big" outside can get saturated by a "pretty big number" of cars.