domain:philippelemoine.com
hydroacetylene
4m ago
Realistically, Ohio doesn't actually have anything to gain from keeping Biden off the ballot, and the Ohio republican party just wants to be dicks about it because they can. Biden has like, a single digit chance of winning Ohio. Whether Biden is technically on the ballot is therefore a minor paperwork issue that Ohio is making a big deal about because it's an opportunity for shitflinging.
That also means that Ohio keeping Biden off the ballot doesn't actually bring any greater likelihood of secession/major consequences. It might indicate that those consequences are more likely than previously thought, but it's not a rung on the escalation ladder.
hydroacetylene
8m ago
The federal government lacks the state capacity it had in 1860.
jkf
14m ago
I don't know how things are in the US, but in Europe you pretty much have to go underground to escape cell coverage.
I had cellular internet (also p2p wifi at one point) before Starlink, and while they sucked less than high-orbit, they suck more than Starlink.
It is extremely impressive that in a few short years Musk has been able to offer a service... lets say an order of magnitude better than literally any legacy telecom in the world -- these are extremely big companies with all sorts of infrastructure already in place, and he has totally slain them. I do believe that in the next year or two you will be able to connect a phone to his constellation from literally anywhere -- this is also very impressive tech-wise, and it happened super-fast.
BinaryHobo
20m ago
The advantage of the software industry over hardware is that hardware is bounded by the laws of physics and the costs of making things and moving them around.
It does, but the downside is that your entire industry can be commoditized by a few people (fewer than people think) or completely destroyed by your competition exiting the market and just releasing their product. Effectively every area Borland was monetizing 30 years ago is completely free now.
Yeah, microsoft's product doesn't wear out naturally, but the other side is, how much more could they have taxed the industry if linux didn't exist? On the other hand, open source hardware has never really gone anywhere.
jkf
27m ago
Indeed -- I'd venture that there is no longer in fact any product competitive with Excel in the general business market!
This is a vast improvement (for M$FT) from the 80s/early 90s when there were quite a few spreadsheet options with different pros and cons.
The product would have obviously been toast if it operated on pure value creation like if it was Coke versus Pepsi and Pepsi was free and Coke costs a $1.
Thing is it's free water vs dollar coke -- both will hydrate you, but one is clearly a different sort of product. (you will note that even though this is in fact the case, Coke sells a lot of Coke!)
SteveKirk
45m ago
My friend I literally just linked an article last week about the FBI skimming through everyone's credit card purchases for "suspicious activity."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
47m ago
I am 95% certain on this. In this 5% chance that it happens, I would like a followup bet that some portion of the US breaks off into its own country.
I could see some portion of the US attempting to split off, but what makes you think they'd be any more successful than the last time it was tried?
BahRamYou
59m ago
Diversification seems like a really good idea here, in that it seems to bring the nature of the disagreement into focus. Almost all the replies I'm seeing are related to SpaceX, but Musk has multiple businesses. Is the general consensus that those other businesses are write-offs, and thus SpaceX has all the value? Does anyone actually expect him to crack auto-driving or tunnel boring or robots or making twitter profitable? Is it just the rockets? Maybe the rockets are enough, maybe not, but is any of the rest plausible enough to bet on, or is it essentially fog?
SpaceX is so far the only really "cool" company that Musk has. Maybe Tesla used to be cool, when EVs were new and they could shatter acceleration records while talking big about "saving the earth." Now they just seem normal- lots of other companies make EVs now too, and we've all had a chance to ride in them and see "OK yeah it's pretty just another car." It's decent but no where near enough to justify it being one of the most valuable companies on earth, ahead of other companies that produce way more money.
SpaceX can still trade on that "we're going to mars!!!!" sci fi aspect. But I think their real value is launching spy sats for the military, and maybe eventually ABM missiles like Brilliant Pebbls, or straight up weapons like "Rods from God." For that, they can pretty much name their price to the military and the US taxpayer.
Ballot Access - I said this back when Trump was potentially gonna get kicked off Colorado ballots. Neither of the two major parties will be off of a state ballot in any state. It does not matter what rules or procedures they fail to follow they will be on the ballot. I am 95% certain on this. In this 5% chance that it happens, I would like a followup bet that some portion of the US breaks off into its own country. Those are the consequences if you don't maintain the illusion of democracy.
The opposite is true of 3rd party candidates. A single failure to follow a single rule, or a single failure to get a triple the number of required signatures will result in them being off the ballot.
edit- went and did some research.
The most recent example of a major Democratic or Republican presidential candidate not appearing on a state ballot was in 1964. Lyndon B. Johnson, the incumbent president and Democratic candidate, was not on the ballot in Alabama. Instead, Alabama had former Governor John Malcolm Patterson as a stand-in candidate for the Democratic Party. This situation stemmed from complex political dynamics and disagreements within the party related to civil rights issues and other national policies at the time.
Before the 1964 instance involving Lyndon B. Johnson, another notable case occurred in the 1956 presidential election. That year, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican incumbent, was not on the ballot in Alabama either. In his place, a slate of unpledged electors was listed instead. This was due to internal disputes within the state's Democratic Party, which was deeply divided over issues such as civil rights. These unpledged electors were intended to be free to vote for a different candidate other than the official party nominees if they were elected.
So aside from Alabama being weird chatgpt could only give me two other examples:
- 1860 Presidential Election: As mentioned earlier, Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was not on the ballot in several Southern states due to his anti-slavery platform. This exclusion was not limited to Alabama but included states like Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
- 1912 Presidential Election: In this election, Theodore Roosevelt, who had previously been a Republican president, ran as a candidate for the Progressive Party (also known as the Bull Moose Party) after failing to secure the Republican nomination against incumbent President William Howard Taft. In some states, such as California, the situation led to a split in which both Taft and Roosevelt were competing for Republican votes, effectively making Roosevelt a major candidate running outside the traditional two-party system, impacting ballot dynamics.
So in one instance we had a literal civil war. And in the other three instances we had major party realignments happening.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
Worth reading?
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
I finished Through Struggle, the Stars after catching a glimmer of a rec from @IdealFireplace and man - I really enjoyed it. I'm less critical of the quality drop off outside of space. There was something strangely addicting about both of the books to where there was some sort of action leading me to turn the page over and over again. I burned through both books very quickly. it's supposed to be a trilogy so, be warned, the fucking author decided to never finish it, instead dedicating himself to an obscure video game that supposedly tries to make horrifically boring spaceship conflict exciting. In that vein, I'll be bitching about Homeworld 3 on Friday.
I also finished Mixtape Hyperborea. Looks like the author is pretty active on goodreads. I enjoyed it quite a bit, though I read some suggestions that you should listen to the actual mixtape on spotify while reading it. Frankly, I didn't like any of the music. The navel-gazing playlist selection and lack of violence were the biggest indicators that the author was most familiar with a prep school instead of public. One common criticism of the book seems to be that it's plotless, which I think is obviously untrue. Is it super exhilarating? No, but at least
Coming up next is me taking another crack at the Culture series. Finished book 1 (what a fuckin drag) and finally finishing up "Don't Sit Under the Grits Tree with Anyone Else but Me".
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
There are other reasons to care about digital hygiene, but the most anodyne people worrying that the FBI is maintaining a dossier about them is probably an effect of five decades of media obsession with counter-culture and rebellion.
Do you also complain about people buying insurance? The chances of your house being set on fire or destroyed are vanishingly small, so these people are just throwing money away for no good reason. Similarly, why waste time putting on a seatbelt when going for a drive? You're probably not going to be in a crash after all, so why subject yourself to the discomfort and wasted time?
Information security and privacy are probably not going to be terribly important for the average person, but you don't know if you're going to be in the minority for whom it becomes exceedingly important and the techniques used to protect yourself cannot be applied retroactively.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Lots of middle-class suburban homeowners get solar as a home improvement, many of them fairly red. As a minor datapoint, I drive all over DFW frequently and see about as many solar panels on roofs in Tarrant county(light red) as Dallas county(deep blue), and only slightly fewer in Denton county(deep red). Exurbs aren't eligible for solar subsidies, just the tax credit, but I still see plenty of panels in exurbs. It's often a reasonable financial decision to install solar panels, even if they're a retarded basis for a power grid.
The mods have always had the problem that their number one overarching goal is to minimize shade, never to maximize light. Thus the steady stream of bans for many of the best contributors starting from the old reddit days.
YE_GUILTY
1hr ago
I think almost all of recent turns in Musk's reputation comes from his depriving of the journalist class of what had been their sacred bullying grounds. Stripping their bluechecks away and handing them out to the highest bidder? Unforgivable.
But even before that, I think (regarding electric cars) he may have had the problem of his would-be allies in the environmental movement not really wanting his help. What does that mean? If the environmental movement is about the environment, then taking electric cars from a Simpsons gag to an everyday sight ought to be greatly desired.
If the environmental movement (except for some true believers) is more about tribal jockeying - about providing yet more proof that the current system is Wrong and must be overthrown, and the right people put in power - then technological solutions are the last sort of help such a movement would want.
"The planet is in terrible danger under the current system, so that system must be overthrown!" / "Here's a way to save the planet without having to overthrow the system!" Is the next line "thanks" or is it "curses!"?
Okay, it's never explicitly "curses!" Instead, there's always some very good reason why any proposed solution to the biggest problem in the world except the desired suite of sociopolitical changes is unacceptable. (Exhibit B: fission power.)
Personally, I'm in favor of humanity innovating its way out of problems over resorting to social control, 'cheating' though it may be. Maybe Elon Musk isn't the person for the job - maybe everything you've written here is true (I don't really care.) Still, though, I'm going to look with suspicion on whatever looks like an attempt to turn down a technological alternative to "overthrowing the system."
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2hr ago
I have a TODO for exploring backblaze, AWS, and other places for offsite storage of large unchanging data sets since I want to keep my data in the event of a house fire.
Have you considered keeping a periodically-updated backup in the trunk of your car?
I appreciate the rundown on your file storage strategy, this sounds thorough and fair. I especially like your strategy of using cloud storage and your local storage pool as redundant backups of each other. That seems to me to be a judicious use of cloud storage, while maintaining personal autonomy and avoiding lock-in. I'm not anti-cloud, but I do think being smart with how you use it is the right call. This goes for autonomy as well as cost; I have hundreds of thousands of family photos stretching back decades, and it became pretty clear to me that any cloud photo provider would cost an insane amount of money to store all this uncompressed.
TheMotte, weirdly, is one place on the internet I go where people are strongly in favor of personal cloud vs. the build-your-own old-school hacker mentality. Then again, the only other places I go on the internet are open source forums, where that mentality is very strong. I'm guessing since the rationalist community drew so heavily from FAANG employees, and the motte drew so heavily from the rationalist community, we have a lot of people who place a great deal of trust in FAANG. It's not so much that I don't think they take security seriously, and more that I think their incentives are misaligned with people's data autonomy. Like when Google decided to make Google Photos not unlimited any more, with it also being somewhat difficult to do a mass-export of your original, full-quality photo data. And Google's usually not too bad with making takeout possible, so that made a lot of people pretty mad.
We put a lot of our lives on our computers, I think having control over them and the ability to make our own choices with how we use and manipulate our thoughts and memories is important. It's not the government I'm worried about -- like you say, they can get whatever they want if they really want to -- but the profit motive, and the random account deletions for inscrutable reasons. Enshittification is real. That's why I really respect your balanced approach and my guess is your strategy is that of the majority among home server enthusiasts. Keep us informed on what you decide for your ZFS backups, I've been looking for a place to store compressed file backups.
Forgotpassword
2hr ago
Unless you're going to take a decade-dated one at which point you get annihilated on fees, the whipsaw effect of a meme stock run by somebody with a history of overpromising random in-vogue ideas makes it hard to leverage against.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
That's another sign to me that it's not a particularly earnest gesture of inclusion - they are obviously male and female, with nothing changed but the names. No additional work has been done, so no additional expense has been incurred. From a development perspective, changing the names of the genders is a trivial task, and defaulting to singular they in all dialogue is slightly cheaper and easier than having distinct male and female variations.
The banner is inclusion, arguably, but the actual itself is profoundly lazy, and insofar as what it does is ignore or misgender everybody who identifies as anything other than they/them (which at last count was approximately everyone), it's actually less welcoming and inclusive.
But it's easy, it looks trendy and/or fits the cultural moment, and if it continues, by reducing the diversity and variability of humans - making everyone a bland, standardised they - it suits the interests of systems designers. A perfect symbol for the time, really.
(Yes, they're distinct male and female types now, but they don't need to be. For instance, in Splatoon 3 there are no gendered body types or identifications - everyone is just an androgynous little squid-kid. I guess the justification there would be that the characters are prepubescent and shouldn't have visibly different physical characteristics, but still, that is a long way from the time when the Pokémon manuals explicitly recommended that the children playing choose the character of their own gender.)
(Alternatively, consider the character creation in a game like BattleTech - there are no gender-locked features. It's been a little while since I played, but I believe that instead you just pick body characteristics from a big chart, so beards, breasts, etc., are perfectly interchangeable. Then at the end you pick pronouns from a drop-down menu. What's gone is any sense that these characteristics form two natural clusters. Instead of men and women, what we have are a bunch of isolated, chopped up body parts that can be reassembled in any combination. It's hard not to feel a bit dehumanised.)
Shrike
2hr ago
It seems to me like SpaceX is the stand-out success (reusable rockets are a big deal!) so there's a sort of natural gravitation towards it, perhaps particularly on here. But I think you raise a good point! In the spirit of answering your questions, here's my somewhat reflexive thoughts on the other stuff:
- Tesla: OP criticizes them for hype (which seems fair) but from what I can tell on a two-second Google they do seem to make money, billions of dollars worth. And my recollection is that they beat the rest of the US automakers in electric cars and still outperform them in other areas. I'd consider leading a company to that sort of success (or really any success!) a W under about any circumstances (even though I think it's perfectly fair to point out how it is rewarded by subsidies.) However, I'm...skeptical about some of the issues with the cars (which may not be unique to Teslas) and I am not sure if the engineering is particularly good – China's got a huge EV market, perhaps in the future they eat his lunch. I'm not especially optimistic about self-driving, at least in the medium term, but that's partially because I think there's strong inertial force against it, and fixing the engineering problems doesn't entail fixing the regulatory and repetitional problems.
- The Boring Company: seems really cool, but also like they missed their moment. Just doesn't seem to be enough demand. Maybe their time will come, but it doesn't seem like it has yet.
- Twitter: renaming it was a bad idea (imho). Firing most of the staff and generally decreasing the draconian attitude was a good idea. I'm very interested to see if he can make the finances work. (In his defense, my understanding was that "getting the finances to work" was something Twitter struggled with before Elon took over.) I actually think the basic plan (strip down the staffing costs, print money on the world's most high-velocity social media platform) was good – obviously some of the advertising income streams hit snafus. I will say that although I'm a fan of the ad-revenue-sharing deal in theory, in practice it does seem somewhat scammy to me. I'm not saying that rises to the level of an actual scam but I can definitely imagine a lot of people misunderstanding which end of the distribution they are on.
So, overall, based on my assessment, I'd say SpaceX is a huge W, Tesla a solid W so far, Boring company hasn't had it moment yet and may never, and Twitter probably a good thing on balance but the jury's still out on the end results for Musk.
jkf
2hr ago
I have a TODO for exploring backblaze, AWS, and other places for offsite storage of large unchanging data sets since I want to keep my data in the event of a house fire.
If any of these datasets contain photos, Amazon's photo storage associated with a Prime subscription is truly and completely 'all you can eat'. (well all I can eat anyways, but I'll bet I have more photos than you)
If they ever decide to wrap this service up (Hi Google!), that backup would be fucked and it would be a hassle of course -- but no worse than if I'd never put the photos there.
4doorsmorewhores
2hr ago
How can we be certain that they didn't give those instructions? If you're resolute in that claim then I'd like to see some evidence or a strong intuition. All we know is that they tried to hire Mrs. Johansson, were unable to, made public references to the film 'Her' with respect to the AI voice, and then hired someone who subjectively the majority of people conflate the voice of with Mrs. Johansson.
If this was a more mundane dispute, say about a restaurant acquiring a hamburger recipe, all of these facts would probably lead us to believe there was an effort to get the goods without due permission. Adding in the prior of this particular company playing very loose with intellectual property rights and ownership pushes it to very likely that they did what everyone here is suspecting them of, and certainly if it was entirely innocuous, they did themselves no favours showing the contrary of our suspicions and made no effort to show anything dispositive in that respect.
I just finished it. I'm only an unthinking consoomer of product with no deep literary opinions, but I thought it was very enjoyable, and I can think of nothing to complain about.
If you want to air your grievances, I'm sure they would be interesting to hear. (Remember that this website does have
Another week, another Tucker interview, another transcription of a juicy part by yours truly. I promise, this is unusual, I haven't listened to two in a row, at all, ever.
This week is Jeffrey Sachs. The part below is just after 1:44.
That was the first mention of Israel, that I could recall, but the whole conversation is about Ukraine, Russia, Putin, and NATO. It's not exactly new to me, but it's refreshing to hear someone so clearly say that this is a war of choice, and the choice is being made by the USA, and their puppet states involved in NATO.
And that was all before any discussion of COVID. tl;dl, it's obviously from a lab, we (USA) pretty clearly funded it, and Fauci has been running the germ warfare branch of the DoD for decades. Which lab, and how is unknown, but, in his own words:
Great interview, and I'm glad that Tucker has twitter dot com to host his stuff, rather than be consigned to the fringes of the internet.
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