I mean, let's be honest here - none of the gifts, favors, or special treatment Thomas has received has changed his decisions. He was always going to pick the most reactionary, oligarch-friendly position. No one has ever said, "The court looks pretty split on this issue, and Clarence Thomas may be the deciding vote."
If you're going to bribe a Justice or try to sway the Court, you pick a moderate. You don't pay the Kool-Aid Man to charge through walls, it's just what he does.
I think it should be the goal of every organization that the next hire always be better than the last. They should get there by making sure that they train and build up every previous hire to be better than they were and making their teams be attractive to higher caliber recruits. A business really doing well should elevate all the employees - wages, skills, lifestyle - and that is what lets them hire well. But boy is it hard to communicate that scheme in two sentences at an all-hands pep talk.
One national election every four years is enough for me. I can't even imagine what the campaigns for judges with the power to rewrite the Constitution through creative interpretation would look like, but if they can put Trump in the White House, they could put him on the Supreme Court.
Term limits. Active oversight. Maybe go back to requiring 60+ votes to confirm so the GOP can't shove the Federalist Society hack-of-the-day through with a simple majority.
I mean, the whole reason that malignant narcissists are successful is that they're very good at playing on their victims' emotions and deceiving. Even someone as trash as Trump, you see this steady stream of new victims both being willing to sacrifice their own social and professional lives on the altar of his ego and being shocked that he won't comply with contract terms or reciprocate with even a mild inconvenience. Imagine some dude standing next to a hot stove, saying it's not that hot and offering $100 to put a hand on it. Then when someone burns their hand, denying he ever made the offer.
You know those scenes in a spy movie where the bad guys start torturing the hero, but he just takes it? Then they threaten the hero's family and he immediately concedes. "Joe, just announce that you won't seek a second term, and I'm sure we can find a pre-trial diversion program for Hunter."
It's not that we're humoring the Republicans, it's that this is their one and only game, and we're bored. Right now, it's Hunter Biden's guns and fake jobs. It was Hillary's emails and Benghazi. Obama's birth certificate. John Kerry's swift boat. Bill Clinton's affair.
The amazing thing is that they've definitely tried it on Joe Biden, and the best the could come up with was smelling women's hair. That man has been in politics for 53 years, and they haven't been able to get even a hint of scandal to stick to him. The best the can do is Hunter.
It was impossible for computers to beat chess and go masters when the computers were trying to play like humans -trying to model high level understanding of strategy and abstract values. The computers started winning when they got fast enough to brute force games - to calculate all of the possible outcomes from all of the possible moves, and to choose the best one.
This is basically the same difference between LLMs and 'true' general AI. The LLMs are brute forcing the next line of a screenplay, with no way to incorporate abstract concepts like truth or logic. If you confuse an LLM for an AI, then you're going to be disappointed in its performance. If you accept that an LLM is a way to average past communications, and accept that a lot of its training set were fiction, then it's an amazing tool for generating consensus text (given that the consensus includes fantasies and lies). It's not going to write new code, but it will give you an approximation of all the existing examples of some algorithm. An approximation that may introduce errors, like copy-pasting sequential lines from every stackexchange answer.
Computer graphics, computer game opponents, they're still doing the same things they were doing decades ago, and the improvements are just doing it all faster. General AI needs to do something different than LLMs and most other ML algorithms.
I was just googling around, and it looks to me like a private rail car costs something like a 2nd home, storage fees similar to property tax, $4/mile to have Amtrak haul you around. Basically a vacation home, but mobile. Definitely a 1% thing, but not billionaires-only. Probably way more prestige in saying you've got a private rail car than a beach house. At least among a certain segment.
Honestly, I feel like he's incomprehensibly wealthy even relative to single-billionaires. Google says there's about 2600 of them on the planet, so I'm putting Musk incomprehensibly wealthy compared to 99.99997% of us
How a single senator holds up hundreds of such individuals over something completely unrelated to the job performance of these flag officers is bewildering.
There's a senate rule that all general offiver promotions require unanimous consent. Like the cloture rule for judicial appointments, they could change it tomorrow, but a lot of Senate rules are there to allow Senators to feel powerful.
Many of the journals I've published in do require a link, usually a PMID or DOI, but they're not usually part of the review process. That is, one doesn't expect academic content reviewers to validate each of the citations, but it's not unreasonable to imagine a journal having an automated validator. The review process really isn't structured to detect fraud. It looks like the article in question was in the preprint stage - i.e.: not even reviewed yet - and I didn't notice mention of where they were submitted.
Message here should be that the process works and the fake article never got published. Very different than the periodic stories about someone who submits a blatantly fake, but hand written, article to a bullshit journal and gets published.
Not clear that the Fairness Doctrine would have changed anything. It only applied to FCC licensees - OTA broadcast, not cable - and it's really the cable news channels and their need to find 24/7 content that's drowned us in shallow, emotional drama-content.
Again, that's the point. China turned away from central planning in the 1980s and 90s, after Mao died. Today's 'miracle' Chinese economy is basically capitalism. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics, if you prefer. If you want to know what command economy looks like, compare Mao's China and Brezhnev's USSR to the US or Europe.
I think some of them are deluded enough to think that it really is like an impeachment and any jury is going to be hopelessly deadlocked between its Democratic and Republican members. Or that the deep state will work its magic, retire all the prosecutors, and there will never even be trials.
I mean, these are generally not smart people with firm grip on reality we're talking about.
I think that's his point: the China that existed as a planned economy collapsed decades ago and got replaced with their current quasi-capitalist system because the planned economy model was even worse than free market capitalism.
Stationary rowing, 5 days/week. It's a good whole-body exercise, heavy on cardiovascular & low impact, but not particularly strengthening. Can sit in front of a movie and just go. Got a tracker to record performance & heart rate, and I really like seeing new bouts appear in the graph. That may be more motivating than the nebulous protection from future cardiovascular disease.
Gotta admit, I only went looking for the dragon because everyone in game said it'd be super helpful, and there's a quest called "Gather your allies." My talker had like 20 charisma and expertise in all the charisma skills...I resolved a lot of conflicts without violence. Disappointed to be forced into combat with the dragon by our guardian angel.
Kind of disappointed with all the interactions with our 'guardian angel' once their true nature was revealed. Maybe I made wrong choices, but their guidance just seemed...off. Not wrong. Not evil. Just somehow not quite right. Maybe somehow inconsistent with their revealed nature, and pushing towards ex machina, like a number of things I don't see how I'd have discovered if they hadn't outright told me. The dragon interaction is part of that not-quite-rightness.
I definitely found the ending to be the least satisfying part of the game. I went straight from the dragon to the final battle, and I think that sequence intensified the less-than-satisfying feeling.
I mean, let's be honest here - none of the gifts, favors, or special treatment Thomas has received has changed his decisions. He was always going to pick the most reactionary, oligarch-friendly position. No one has ever said, "The court looks pretty split on this issue, and Clarence Thomas may be the deciding vote."
If you're going to bribe a Justice or try to sway the Court, you pick a moderate. You don't pay the Kool-Aid Man to charge through walls, it's just what he does.