ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I don’t see Newsom getting the nomination in any contest that involves an actual primary. Older black Democrats in the south have a lot of pull in the primaries and they don’t like slick sharky Patrick Bateman types. Biden’s goofiness was actually a big advantage for him in those contests.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
But a big part of why the whole Cagot discrimination thing fell apart is that there really was no way to physically distinguish a Cagot from any other person either at a glance, or by thorough examination. Once families stopped living in the same medieval town of 800 people for generation after generation it became untenable. Even back then it relied on an elaborate system of written records and forced signaling.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Stolen bitcoins? I have no doubt that soon Home Depot Presents: The Police® will be hauling away the perpetrators in Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents handcuffs. Assuming someone can pay them to investigate, this isn’t a communist country after all.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Also the physical jobs have been getting automated since the invention of the domesticated ox, the wheel, the lever, the steam engine and the assembly line. So what you are left with is the hardened core of physical jobs that are the hardest and least efficient to automate.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I think people are becoming increasingly aware that the Democratic Party might actually cease to exist as a going concern, and that from here on out all power struggles are going to be inter-factional ones within the Republican Party. So you’re seeing a higher willingness within the party to have these intense gang fights over policy direction. That’s also what’s causing the whole “woke right” squabble.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
They don’t necessarily have to frame anyone though. Just announce a fictitious perpetrator.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Frankly I suspect European authorities might be straight up lying about the identities of suspects now. I’ve clocked two suspiciously terrorist-like attacks on the last few weeks (a vehicle ram attack in the UK and a mass stabbing in Germany) where the authorities immediately announced that it was committed by a white European. I can’t confirm the Germany one but the on the scene video of the UK attack was ambiguous, the guy looked like he could potentially be English, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he was Syrian or Egyptian either.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
But how much this is confounded by the fact that the economic outlook for working class men in the Rust Belt is currently really bad? In 1975 you would have seen vastly higher amounts of fatal drug overdose rates in America’s ruined cities than out in the countryside. Now the situation is reversed.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skill found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.
–The Yuma Daily Sun
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
China's got a half dozen space startups working on Falcon 9 class vehicles; none are at SpaceX's level yet but like 4 of them have at least reached orbit.
Alright so which one of those half dozen Chinese start-ups will the US government trust to launch its incredibly classified spy satellites?
SpaceX has a hell of a lot of long-term government and military contracts. Blue Origin is about the only other company that might end up being major competition, eventually, but only in the long term. Blue Origin currently has its own major problems and dysfunctions and doesn’t have much actual developed capability yet. SpaceX’s only actual peer competitor, Roscosmos, is now unavailable in the Western market for security reasons, due to being owned by the government of a now-hostile state.
Starship is just the flashy sports car to create brand awareness, and potentially develop future capabilities. It’s not the bread and butter. The cost of the Starship project is quite small compared to the SpaceX bottom line and even if it flames out completely it’s not going to even get close to tanking the whole company.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Medvedev was keeping the seat warm because Putin was constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term
Yes, exactly like Trump who I have no doubt would at least try to run for a third term if he wasn’t constitutionally prohibited from doing that.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
My first thought was the “Putin-Medvedev strategy” but I didn’t want to sidetrack the thread into a 500 reply tangent about the war.
I have never felt any strong enough need to post that I thought it necessary to make an account
Read: “I made an alt so I can drop a pissy comment without repercussions”
I think a contributing factor is also that a new generation has grown up steeped in progressive rhetoric but that isn’t “in on the joke”. Millennial and Baby Boomer progressives knew on some level that this was all just a rhetorical device for advancing the Democratic Party’s electoral interest. Trans women weren’t actually women. We aren’t actually planning to have a real no-joke, violent communist Revolution and put the CEOs up against the wall. We shouldn’t actually try to drive Israel into the sea because the State Department wouldn’t like that, even if there is no logical way to justify its existence under the ideological creed we loudly profess. But now you have zoomer progressives who genuinely believe all this without even a hint of irony.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Let's not pretend that there will be much of his mind left in 4 or 8 years.
You’ve already had the last four years of solid practice gaslighting yourself that the President isn’t a drooling dementia patient. You’ll be fine. And in any case, he wouldn’t need to run the day-to-day operations, just make sure that Don Jr. and Vance are broadly ideologically correct.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Anything you think Ive missed?
The Octavian strategy. Run Donald Junior. People wouldn’t care that much about Donald Junior’s personal qualifications because they know Trump Senior will be backseat driving. Vance is Marcus Agrippa.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
That’s the thing if they were talking about their Gucci AR that they only ever took to the range I could see it, but when you’re talking about an artillery system in a currently ongoing war that is definitely going to kill people, it feels so ghoulish.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Literally any kind of weapon. Small arms, artillery systems, cruise missiles, ships, heavy bombers. Every time there’s a new weapons system delivered to Ukraine it’s “Ukraine has some fun new toys to play with” or “Operation Spiderweb destroyed a lot of Russia’s toys”. Once you notice it, you notice that they do it constantly and it’s really started grinding my gears.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Why do Redditors compulsively refer to weapons of war designed to maim and kill people as “toys”?
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Conservatism is not an ideology. It's an orientation. Moreover, it's an orientation against a reference point.
One thing I love about the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union is that it’s about the only time and place in history where you could be a Conservative Communist.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Well, there’s definitely a strong belief that the elites are evil - ridiculously, cartoonishly evil, to the point that they poison the water and the skies, intentionally derail trains, and start wars just to make common people suffer.
That’s not just a modern American phenomenon. If you screw people over long enough they will eventually think you’re doing it on purpose. In the the few years before the French Revolution there was a persistent conspiracy theory among the poor residents of Paris that the food shortages were an intentional plot to starve the French people. In Russia in 1916 there were endemic rumors that the Tzarina was a German spy who was intentionally sabotaging the war effort.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Also the fact that you showed up to a protest with a gun would be used against you in the ensuing trial to make it look like you were out looking for trouble.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
In the last few hours there has been a massive drone attack on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. Apparently drone swarms were smuggled into Russia in cargo trucks and released a short distance from the airfields. Some of the bases attacks are more than 4,500 kilometers away from the Ukrainian border. The Ukrainian MOD claims that 34 percent of Russias’s strategic air force has been destroyed. This is an unconfirmed number, but there are multiple videos of groups of 4-7 TU-95 bombers burning on their airfields.
Well remember even passing the basic casual Turing test used to be extremely difficult. It took at least 65 years between the creation of the test and systems beginning to pass it consistently. And I still remember science articles and science fiction stories from the 90s and 2000s talking about it like it was the holy grail. It’s only in the past few years that it’s started to seem like an inadequate measurement of an AI’s capabilities.
Interestingly your motivated Turing test starts to sound a lot like the Voight-Kampff test from Bladerunner.
More options
Context Copy link