rational_lib @ rational_lib @lemmy.world

https://rationallib.substack.com/

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8 mo. ago

The whole mass deportation thing is blatantly absurd. There won't be a mass deportation. There might be an attempt at a mass deportation, but there's no way a bunch of guys who can't figure out how to book a room at the Four Seasons are gonna figure out all the problems. There's just not the resources or other places to detain, move, and deposit that many people. It's the Wall Part II. It's just gonna be the existing policy, but with press conferences claiming they did something.

The whole point was to put this in your cubicle so you could pretend you had a personality that was more than being a cog in the machine. Then the pandemic happened.

This is the difference. Both the right and the left have their cranks, but the ones on the left never get mainstream acceptance. While on the right, they make the crank president.

They're a convenient political target because it makes insecure men not want to be associated with them. Believe it or not, a similar thing happened last time Republicans won the popular vote in 2004 - back then the issue was gay marriage. Bush went hard on opposing that and it helped him win.

It's because there's no opposing corporate interest to building nuclear weapons. The way the world works is: profitable shit happens, no matter what the hippies think about it. See: every other environmental issue.

It's not one-sided because Trump is what one-sided looks like. Democrats still support trying for a Palestinian state, while Trump wants Israel to not stop at Gaza but take what remains of the West Bank too. You don't get to define the sides the way you want, we're still dealing with the American public here - and the American public is very anti-muslim and militaristic (I mean we do have to live in a world where 9/11 happened - which, by the way, was one of the more egregious examples of the counter-productive effect of attempts to make Americans care about Palestine).

I'm the last to justify continuing aid to Israel, but if you don't understand the political difficulty of removing that aid you're just not paying attention. This will be seen as a win for Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah and the backlash will be massive with lots of accusations that Democrats are embracing anti-semetism. And Democrats know from past causes like BLM that the same people advocating very forcefully for changing policy will morph into crickets when it comes time to defend those changes from backlash, having moved on to more exciting causes. So yeah, I disagree with aid to Israel but I can't really blame them.

Trump has promised a cabinet position to every insufferable asshole in the country who insists that everyone accept their own fringe views and talks over anyone who disagrees, while also knowing nothing about what they're talking about. This is gonna be funny to watch, but painful to experience.

Behind door #1: Isn't as one-sided as you regarding a war in another country that involves your religion.
Behind door #2: Tried to enact laws that openly discriminate against your religion just a few years ago. And is also totally one-sided against you regarding that same war.

It's a tough choice.

Doesn't matter. They're not doing it to get people to see their ads, they're doing it to bribe Elon since he has actual political power now. Kind of like how oil companies buy ads on news media, even though you don't need to be persuaded to buy oil - it's to buy favorable coverage.

The world just keeps getting more and more efficient at being dumb. Let's just count all the appallingly stupid things crammed into this small meme with 2 million views:

1. "Insurrection Barbie"
2. Celebrating the defunding of useful scientific research by a new government efficiency agency
3. This new agency is named after a cryptocurrency
4. The cryptocurrency in question was created as a joke to satirize cryptocurrencies, but became a top prominent cryptocurrency itself.
5. The "Department of Government Efficiency Agency" has 2 heads, both of whom have other primary jobs and were chosen in return for political support.
6. There is also already an existing government agency that does the exact same thing, called the "Government Accountability Office". But most people seem to be unaware of it, likely because it's not named after a cryptocurrency/dog meme.
7. This whole scheme was the idea of the richest person in the world.

Idiocracy didn't happen because of unnatural selection, it happened because social media unlocked a runaway chain reaction of stupidity.

Very frequently, yes. As well as closed source code and intellectual property of all kinds. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

Non-billionaire controlled so far. It's a public benefit corporation, which is vulnerable to being Altmaned. Once it becomes valuable money will find a way.

As I use copilot to write software, I have a hard time seeing how it'll get better than it already is. The fundamental problem of all machine learning is that the training data has to be good enough to solve the problem. So the problems I run into make sense, like:

1. Copilot can't read my mind and figure out what I'm trying to do.
2. I'm working on an uncommon problem where the typical solutions don't work
3. Copilot is unable to tell when it doesn't "know" the answer, because of course it's just simulating communication and doesn't really know anything.

2 and 3 could be alleviated, but probably not solved completely with more and better data or engineering changes - but obviously AI developers started by training the models on the most useful data and strategies that they think work best. 1 seems fundamentally unsolvable.

I think there could be some more advances in finding more and better use cases, but I'm a pessimist when it comes to any serious advances in the underlying technology.

That's what they did this election, and we got fascism and the DNC doesn't matter anymore. So now what?

Do a hostile takeover of the GOP instead. Many states don't care why party you register as, and if they do just register as a Republican and vote in their primaries. Pick a socialist candidate and get them to run as a Republican, and vote for them. This is in essence what Trump did, but of course he did it for fascism and got Nazis to vote Republican. The same strategy can work for anyone else. This can start in safe blue states where no one votes in the GOP primaries and spread from there.

This is a far more realistic strategy because third parties are vulnerable to the spoiler effect and will always fail due to people being worried about electing Republicans.

Network effects, boomers being unable to figure out how to switch

There will be Fox News appearances.

That's not actually related to my point though. This is more like:

First they tweeted offensive things about women, and I made sure that thing they tweeted is now the only thing we talk about.

Then we couldn't talk about all the women dying of not getting abortions on time because we're too busy talking about tweets.

How about we stop focusing on reacting in kind to things the biggest nazi assholes say (possibly to evoke this sort of reaction and get more attention for themselves) and maybe just ignore them instead so they don't bring down the conversation to some bullshit fascist online troll level.