DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
10mo ago
When I hear that something like half of Trump supporters claim to literally believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, yet I also see that basically none of them used guns to do anything about it, it gives me some doubt about this whole "bulwark against government tyranny" train of thought
Most people in the US have a vision to Tyranny built around English aristocrats oppressing them with uniformed troops.
The reality is any tyrannical group coming into power is going to be too weak at first to use the police to oppress their enemies. Instead there's a gang of government supporters who are allowed to commit crimes against the disfavoured groups without the police intervening. Often they are masked, but not always.
This is a very loose category that includes everyone from the KKK to Hitler's brownshirts to Antifa. Maduro has 'colectivos'. They are just everywhere.
The second amendment is very effective against this loose category. Without it inner city crime gangs would have been driving out the the suburbs and rural areas to rob and kill.
Things like the 2020 election are about allegations of widespread corruption. Guns aren't helpful there. They need to tighten laws and gather evidence.
DradisPing
10mo ago
I think Colbert's problem is that he's a sketch comic who kind of fell into political humour because of the Daily Show. He was doing a sort of Bill O'Reilly parody, but The O'Reilly Factor ended in 2017 and lost relevance long before that.
So fundamentally he's not big into thinking about politics and coming up with jokes based on that. He just goes along with whatever the current Dem talking points are and writes jokes around that.
DradisPing
10mo ago
You're brain hasn't been trained to automatically read the road and the environment to pick out what's important. You're actively evaluating everything on the road because it's a new experience and your automatic systems don't know how to handle things.
Long term drivers just cruise around on autopilot. You need to drive more to establish a baseline of what's normal on the roads in your area.
My best advice is to make sure your first car is something that would be described as an "old lady car". You can wobble a bit in your lane and everyone will give you plenty of space. If you start off with a BMW everyone will assume you're an aggressive asshole driver and won't let you in.
DradisPing
10mo ago
I'm not a gun expert, but is there a risk that if the scoped got knocked in transport he'd need to re-zero it?
DradisPing
10mo ago
gluten is a fall guy for glyphosate in the wheat supply chain. Damaged wheat crops are harvested with roundup to kill the plant, thus drying out the wheat, and TPTB would rather blame gluten than roundup.
The other possibility is folic acid fortification, which started in 1998.
DradisPing
10mo ago
The press have refused to interview him and the DNC cancelled early primaries because they were afraid of him winning a few of them.
Polling wise he was doing much better than Nader ever did. As a spoiler candidate he was putting Biden - Harris in a position where they would have do dump campaign resources into moderately safe states. So there's been an unprecedented legal effort to keep him off of ballots.
Basically he's an outlet for disaffected hippy-ish Dems who have objections to the Big Government / Big Corporate administrative state policies in things like agriculture and health that are currently unquestionable in the DNC. Also things like should we really be pushing for war against Russia and Iran. Or is having "ex" CIA agents as reporters really a good thing. Or is having the FBI & feds identifiy "misinformation" or "malinformation" on social media really a good thing.
He has a bunch of connections to lib left people in tech.
The big thing is that it will give social cover to people on the left who aren't keen on Kamala. It undermines the whole "anything to stop Hitler" message. It's easier for people to not donate now and speak out against some of the "thumb on the scale" stuff Google has been doing in elections.
DradisPing
10mo ago
I think most serial killer cases today will solve themselves, in that they will eventually turn into pretty open and shut style murders.
Often a victim gets away or kills the killer. It goes down as burglary or attempted rape, since it's generally not clear that the killer was planning to kill them.
DradisPing
10mo ago
The Serbia-USA game proved conclusively that the racial makeup of the NBA is mostly the result of racism. An all white team played the USA all star team to the fourth quarter, a USA team that didn't feature a single white player. There wasn't a single white American who was even particularly close! Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball: the USA has vastly more Slavic citizens than Serbia. You have to play serious genetic gymnastics to come out with a logical genetic explanation for American slavs relative lack of talent compared to European slavs. We're missing out on a lot of talented players!
Blacks physically mature a bit more quickly than whites, and there is a real bias against white players at the high school level. Tall white kids tend not to get court time on the high school teams and often go over to baseball where being a tall pitcher is a plus.
DradisPing
10mo ago
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
In this case the LLM is trained on data containing word tokens instead of words. So it can't actually see the letters of words and can't do certain wordplay.
DradisPing
9mo ago
The people pushing MeToo didn't really understand the situation.
The first sexual harassment was in 1974. By the 90s lawsuits we common enough that Michael Crichton's Disclosure (1994) featured a fake sexual harassment complaint as part of a conspiracy.
Business men protected themselves through a mix of better behaviour, legal strategies, and other techniques to avoid trouble.
However since the lawyers involved were strongly left wing, liberal strongholds like Hollywood and the Media were given a pass and ignored. This was compounded by the fact that those industries attract a lot of pretty girls, have powerful men at the top, and look down on traditional sexual rules.
This wasn't well understood on the left, and they all insisted on believing that Republican businessmen are the worst people ever and much worse about things that MeToo covers.
So activists pushed MeToo hard. Then they noticed that all the big fish going down were on their side. So they sort of stopped talking about the whole thing.
DradisPing
9mo ago
I was trying to find the right words to capture a bunch of different things. I was thinking of having the lawyers explain to the bosses that making passes at subordinates endangers the company and they will be fired, while also making sure that they are aware that there are a lot of ways to use money and status to get sex outside of the office.
DradisPing
9mo ago
My suspicion is that it isn't related to MeToo at all.
Powerful people in DC are still enraged about Musk's purchase of Twitter. This arrest happened shortly after it was revealed that Diddy invested in the Twitter purchase.
So I think that Merrick Garland saw Diddy's name in the Twitter investors and told the FBI to dust off their Diddy file and throw the book at him.
DradisPing
9mo ago
The big red flag is that the crimes seem to take place in Miami and LA, but the indictment was filed in SDNY. SDNY is where they like to do their politicized prosecutions. Charges filed there with a dubious connection to NYC implies that this is about him pissing someone off. Twitter is just a guess.
DradisPing
9mo ago
The Steve Bannon prosecution over the build the wall foundation happened in SDNY. The recent "Tenet Media indictment" of two Russians took place in SDNY. No connection to NYC in either of those cases. There are a lot more, I don't have a list handy. Ricky Vaughn was going to be prosecuted there, but they filed in Easter District NY instead because they thought the jury would be better.
Maurene Comey, James Comey's daughter, works there.
When Geoffrey Berman ran SDNY he tried to claim that AG Barr couldn't fire him and tried to continue to serve.
It'll take an effortpost to go into depth.
DradisPing
9mo ago
What I've heard, and I'm not really competent to explain, is that it has to do with the UN and changes to international law post WW2.
There were a bunch of attempts to use rules to make war without the security council's approval illegal. Also major leaders were unhappy with countries who tried to stay neutral during WW2, so there are a bunch of rules that make staying neutral difficult. I don't remember the specifics, but it's something like letting one side's ships use your ports or pass through your waters makes you a co-belligerent. There are also some rules about trade.
So actually declaring war makes things extremely awkward for your friends and allies.
DradisPing
9mo ago
That's a fairly short timeframe to get the highest gdp per capita on earth. On the other hand it'd be the highest concentration of extremely high iq people.
Realistically they'd need to develop and market a major tech breakthrough like the next Ozempic or something in AI.
That kind of sudden gain in wealth is going to generate blowback regionally and internationally. It'd be difficult to pull off.
DradisPing
9mo ago
It doesn't seem fair to call it a pyramid scheme. It's just sharing revenue from platform subscribers with the accounts they like.
Twitter is in a strange place where major leftwing users have been trying to bankrupt the company. Encouraging advertiser boycotts and discouraging their readers from getting a paid account.
It isn't really surprising that Twitter went with a monetization system where those users don't get paid.
DradisPing
9mo ago
They're upset at Elon because they think he doesn't know his place. Aerospace and Car Manufacturing are two big powerful industries in the US. Don't forget about the recent Boeing whistleblower "suicides" where the FBI just shrugged.
He's embarrassed a lot of powerful people and they are trying to teach him to be properly deferential to his betters.
DradisPing
8mo ago
Mental fatigue is a real thing. If you only count hours spent actually running then training for a marathon doesn't seem that impressive.
Spending 2 hours a night and 6 hours a day on weekends learning math is going to be exhausting. But it's pretty easy to do that with video games.
DradisPing
8mo ago
My suspicion is that Harris did work ad McDs, but it was in high school in Montreal. Her campaign doesn't really want to draw attention to her childhood outside the US, so they are being evasive.
DradisPing
8mo ago
It's hard to square the Selzer poll with anything else we're seeing. Looking at Iowa early voter turnout as a percentage of 2020, R got 83% and D got 56%. Sure it's possible that there's a huge block of voters coming out on EDay or that large numbers of Rs are coming out to vote for Harris.
The top 2 issues found in the poll were Democracy and Abortion. Which seems a little weird. Iowa passed some major abortion restrictions over the summer. It seems possible that voters would take that out on Trump, but it's odd that it's suddenly showing up in a poll.
Ann Selzer is 67. It's certainly possible that she took a big payout from someone so she could retire and the Harris campaign could save house seats. Or it could be a polling miss.
Or it could be real. But I'm surprised no one else noticed it if it was real.
DradisPing
8mo ago
It feeds into the culture war. This was a multi agency raid with judicial warrants to kill a squirrel and racoon.
Blue tribe members love to talk about how much government money is spent on rural people. But then things like this are counted as spending money on rural people.
It touches on other aspects. The agents used the search warrant as an opportunity to grill the woman of the house on her immigration status, which is something they never would have done to someone in NYC.
It's common to hear online that people can't understand why other parts of the state would want to separate from NYC when it brings in so much tax revenue.
But a rural view of the situation is sort of like this: A man from the government walks up and demands $5. He then pays his friend $10 to slap you as hard as he can. Then the man goes on a long rant about how much he spends to govern these fucking takers.
Sure, the government man is net spending money. But the rural guy isn't exactly happy about the transaction.
DradisPing
8mo ago
The AG has a lot of power to go after individuals in the state. So if a dangerous nutter starts gaining steam in a major party primary it's easy for a better tempered opponent to raise money against them. People on both sides face risk so the other primary candidates can get funding from people who normally wouldn't donate.
Also voters usually just want someone polished and respectable to be AG. There's less demand for someone ideological.
DradisPing
8mo ago
The far left has been strongly focusses on Gaza for the past year. It's not clear they have enough gas in the tank to gather mobs in the case of a Trump victory.
Currently they are assigned randomly by lottery to valid applicants. I've long argued that an easy first step is just sort them by salary and assign them that way.
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