HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
7d ago
Have to admit, I do like Newsom's brass neck in rewriting his personal history to try and present himself as relatable (or maybe simply to get some distance given the Democratic party's current 'eat the rich' stance) to we ordinary little people, talking about how he was/is dyslexic and had a hardscrabble upbringing due to his divorced mom having to work two jobs.
Yeah, that's because your dad was a deadbeat, Gavin, and we don't all get to hang out with the Gettys because our dad - who is too mean to pay proper child support - instead introduces us to useful contacts among the mega-rich to make up for that.
I don't trust the guy, but the audacity there is nearly admirable. "I was pretty much broke growing up, I only got to visit the homes of billionaires and hang out with them instead of living in one such of our own".
HereAndGone2
7d ago
Crazy talk here, I know, but what do you think of a possible deal where Vance runs for president and picks Rubio as his VP, positioning him for a run at the big job himself later?
HereAndGone2
7d ago
"Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, seriously, what the hell is it?"
It's like they started out with a submarine then forgot what they were doing half-way through.
HereAndGone2
7d ago
Imagine the level of depravity in his low, cunning, mind to debase himself so as to be polite and reasonable in a debate! Is there no iniquity too foul and black that the GOP will not sink to?
HereAndGone2
7d ago
Not just the USA, I've been reading a couple of stories in the Irish media recently which left me going "how the fuck did this guy get bail? what was wrong with that judge?"
HereAndGone2
7d ago
he is a tireless climber and a fairly smart, ruthless one at that
Which seems to be the problem if the Atlantic story is any way accurate. Lot of enemies inside the party who will be all too happy to knife him in the back should he formally run:
The worst-kept secret in Pennsylvania politics is that the governor is disliked—in certain cases, loathed—by some of his fellow Democrats. The causes vary: policy disputes, personality clashes, accusations of meddling and sabotaging and ceaseless self-promoting. When Shapiro was being vetted for vice president in the summer of 2024, Erin McClelland, whom Democrats had recently nominated for Pennsylvania treasurer, stunned the state party by suggesting on social media that Shapiro would “undermine” Harris—adding other insults for good measure.
...The private commentary from Democrats is worse. In 30 years spent climbing the party ladder, Shapiro has acquired a long list of enemies. If he wasn’t already aware, the governor found out the hard way in 2024, when a not-small and not-subtle chorus of Democrats made their misgivings about him known to Harris and her team. (A Pennsylvania lawmaker told me that, at one point, a member of Harris’s vetting operation called him to say that in their decades working in party politics, they had never witnessed so many Democrats turning on one of their own.) If Shapiro chooses to run for president in 2028, Democrats in the state told me, the backlash will be far more visible.
HereAndGone2
7d ago
Newsom at the moment looks like the front-runner, but his problem (same as with Kamala) is that the skills that won things in California aren't going to scale up to the national stage. Nate Silver had a run-down of "these are possible Democratic candidates who are doing better than Newsom" but none of those jumped off the page for me.
It can't be Kamala a second time, because she imploded so badly first time round that if they put her in a free primary there's no way she'll win (see her run for 2020 which planted the seeds of a lot of things that tripped her up in 2024, e.g. the infamous trans surgeries bit) and if they try and force her as the nominee as they did for 2024 there are no reasons for it this time round as there were last time, and unless someone has even fewer functioning brain cells than Tim Walz no way they would agree to be her VP (see Shapiro's little hissy-fit over why she rejected him).
HereAndGone2
7d ago
Yes, he beat that stupid oaf moron Walz, but so could almost anyone.
Possibly, but Kamala is so funny in her memoir because she is so salty over the lapdog she picked, because he would be a lapdog, not being able to win against that rascally scoundrel cad Vance:
It was not a comfortable role for him. He had fretted from the outset that he wasn’t a good debater. I’d discounted his concerns. He was so quick and pithy in front of the crowds at our rallies, I thought he’d bring those qualities to the podium. He’d prepared with Pete Buttigieg, a consummate debater, and I thought his big heart and his good humor would counter J. D. Vance’s malice and pessimism.
But J. D. Vance is a shape-shifter. And a shifty guy. He understood that his default meanness wouldn’t play against Tim Walz’s sunny disposition and patent decency. Throughout the debate, he toned the anger and the insults way down. As Van Jones later remarked, he sane-washed the crazy. There were no cat ladies, no pet-eating Haitians, no personal insults. Just a mild-mannered, aw-shucks Appalachian pretending he had a lot of common ground with that nice Midwestern coach.
When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at J.D.’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug, “What is happening?”
I told the television screen: “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.”
There was not supposed to be any on-air fact-checking in this debate, as there had been in mine. But the moderators did correct Vance twice, on the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change and on the legal immigration status of Haitians in Springfield.
“The rules were you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” Vance complained petulantly, in a flash of his more familiar persona.
Tim fell into a pattern of defending his record as a governor. Then he fumbled his answer when the moderator, predictably, questioned why he had claimed to be in Hong Kong during the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. Tim had been on his way to teach in China that summer but hadn’t yet left the United States on the date of the massacre. Instead of simply stating that he’d gotten his dates mixed up, but that being in China during a period of human rights oppression had profoundly influenced him, he talked about biking in Nebraska.
The following weekend, Saturday Night Live did a sketch in which actors posed as Doug and me, sitting on our couch, watching the debate. While I did not in fact spit out wine, it was otherwise uncanny in its portrait of our evening.
Tim felt bad that he hadn’t done better. I reassured him that the election would not be won or lost on account of that debate, and in fact it had a negligible effect on our polling.
In choosing Tim, I thought that as a second-term governor and twelve-year congressman he would know what he was getting into. In hindsight, how could anyone?
HereAndGone2
7d ago
a cartoon corrupt mayor character named Potato McDrunkie
Should I be offended at racial stereotyping there? 🤣
I agree, Bill has charisma by the shedload, and it's part of why Hillary failed in her endeavours, she comes across as even more robotic and schoolmarmish when it's Bill's effortless charm standing beside her. I never trusted him an inch, but it's no wonder he went into politics, he could indeed charm the birds out of the trees.
HereAndGone2
8d ago
This is WELS erasure 😁
I only became aware of the various denominational splits years back when observing the Anglican Wars as they played out in TEC. As a Roman Catholic European outsider, it was fascinating to get any kind of look at American mainline Protestantism and how it tended to split along various lines.
HereAndGone2
8d ago
Uh, does over-enthusiastic loading of the thurible with incense count?
HereAndGone2
8d ago
So we're hypothesizing a DHS white-supremacist who thinks Barack Obama is white
Damn it, I'll bite.
Is he not? He's the son of a black (absent) Nigerian father and a white mother. He was raised by her, his grandparents, and for a time an Indonesian stepfather. He has not, so far as I can make out, any experience at all of his father's culture or homeland. He was not raised 'typically' black as the majority of African-Americans were (Michelle was very important to him as being authentically African-American background and able to introduce him to that).
If you can be black with one white parent, why can't you be white with one black parent, if your upbringing was functionally white as a white child?
(The above is not seriously meant).
HereAndGone2
9d ago
Story I'm seeing now is that it was outdated intelligence; school was in same area as a naval base, so collateral damage oh dear how unfortunate:
The US used “outdated intelligence” to carry out a missile attack that struck an Iranian school, a report has found.
The Pentagon is investigating the strike, which killed about 170 children and 14 teachers, according to Iranian state media.
Evidence is mounting that the US was responsible for the attack on the school in Minab, southern Iran, on February 28, which has prompted international condemnation.
Fragments of an American Tomahawk missile were found at the site, which is next to an Iranian naval base.
The US Central Command created the target coordinates using old data from the Defence Intelligence Agency, sources briefed on the investigation told The New York Times.
They said questions remained over why the outdated information was not double-checked and stressed that the findings were preliminary.
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni has accused the US and Israel of acting “outside the scope of international law” with their attacks on Iran.
In her strongest criticism yet of the conflict, she also demanded that Washington find out who was responsible for the missile strike on the girls’ school as she labelled the attack a “massacre”.
Her comments may upset Donald Trump, who can be sensitive to criticism from world leaders he considers allies. He and Ms Meloni have long appeared to have a close friendship.
On Saturday, Mr Trump said he believed Iran was responsible for the attack “based on what I’ve seen”.
Two days later, he said it was “Iran or somebody else”, adding that the Tomahawk missile was “very generic” and “sold to other countries”.
He added: “I just don’t know enough about it.”
Iran is not thought to have any Tomahawks. Apart from the US, the weapon is used by Britain, Australia and the Netherlands.
John Kennedy, a Republican senator and close ally of Mr Trump, apologised on Monday for the strike, which he called a “terrible” mistake.
He said: “Other countries do that sort of thing intentionally, like Russia. We would never do that intentionally. I think the department is investigating it now, and I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry it happened.”
On Tuesday night, it emerged that US defence secretary Pete Hegseth had sacked staff responsible for preventing civilian war deaths before the strike.
Mr Hegseth had effectively gutted the Civilian Protection Centre of Excellence, which was set up under his predecessor, Lloyd Austin, to prevent, mitigate and investigate harm to civilians.
He cannot abolish the agency because it has been approved by an act of Congress, but he has cut around 90pc of its workforce, according to Politico.
The team that handles civilian casualties at the US Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has been cut from 10 to one.
Mr Hegseth has taken a sledgehammer to policies and rules inside the Pentagon that he sees as “woke” or working against his warrior ethos, including banning fat generals and facial hair.
In a speech in September, he said: “We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralise, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.
“No more politically correct rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”
How true that is, ye can argue over it in the comments.
HereAndGone2
10d ago
HereAndGone2
11d ago
Okay, that adds another layer to it. If she's managed to score a Japanese guy, she was probably willing to put up with more crap from him because of the Japanese attitude to foreigners. Though apparently Japanese have a good impression of Indonesians (if I believe online search results) while seemingly there's a more negative attitude to Koreans.
So it depends exactly where she was from and if the guy was Japanese or not. I mean, I still think she's an idiot, but there's more going on there than simply "yeah of course I'm gonna sleep with him, he's hot".
HereAndGone2
11d ago
That's the kind of behaviour that is frustrating and that her mother should have smacked out of her.
Plainly, she is that type of girl, she just was affronted by the guy being so explicit about it. He was hot enough that she agreed to go on a date, so she probably would have had sex anyway, he just needed to play the game. Demanding at the start that she put out (or, the presumed implication, he would call off the date) was insulting: if he would call off the date, then she wasn't hot enough for him.
Now, whether that was a bluff on his part or not, I don't know, but she didn't call him on it and so yeah. We're just arguing over the price now.
Servalan starts off genuinely intelligent (and Jacqueline Pearce's casting was wonderful because physically she's this big-eyed waif type whom you would not expect to be the ice-cold ruthless manipulator who survives everything), but of course over the course of the series she gets over-powered.
Mainly by the cast being idiots - though Avon has always been not as smart as he thinks he is - Tarrant, though, definitely was not thinking with his brain when he was stranded with her.
I love that the SFX are done on the cheap, because this is the Beeb, and the title sequence is done in cross-stitch(!) and one of the space ships is a hair dryer cut in half and glued back together.
The ending is fantastic. It's really, really a shock when you see it the first time because you're hoping that there will be the heroic ending of the plucky, scrappy underdogs winning over the villainous tyrannical regime (like every American movie and show does). It's as if Star Wars ended with the Emperor having killed off the entire Resistance, and he got Luke to do it.
I think the "killing off everyone" was maybe (I don't know this for sure) to knock on the head any calls for a renewal of the show (the BBC has tended to look down on SF shows that get popular, see Doctor Who, as being Not Serious Broadcasting or Worthy Artistic Productions), plus it's very much in the downbeat, cynical British tradition (the plucky, scrappy rebels have been reduced by attrition and by previous successful Federation campaigns to a disorganised, fragmented bunch on the run trying to rebuild and being driven from every base they find, and in the end the organisation of power and resources in the Federation, as well as internal treachery, in-fighting, and loss of direction*, is just too much for them. The Bad Guys win because this is how the world works, and this was before George R.R. Martin tried the same thing in A Song of Ice and Fire to turn all the traditional tropes on their head).
*We see this when Blake disappears. Avon is "to hell with principles, I wanna be rich" but even there, their attempts to be space pirates go hilariously wrong (the fourth season episode Gold is wonderful with double-cross over double-cross).
Okay, your first example makes better sense, tethering it to something that is a physical store of value and then all the fancy tech comes in with ledgers and so forth.
The monkey pictures stuff never made sense to me.
And I see that FTX sank money into the monkey pictures, then unsuccessfully sued were named as colluding to artificially inflate the price in a lawsuit when the value went down after the hype faded:
“FTX has several deep ties to Yuga such that it would be mutually beneficial for both Yuga and FTX (as well as Sotheby’s) if the BAYC NFT collection were to rise in price and trading volume activity. Upon information and belief, given the extensive financial interests shared by Yuga, Sotheby’s and FTX, each knew that FTX was the real buyer of the lot of BAYC NFTs at the Sotheby’s auction at the time that Sotheby’s representatives were publicly representing that a ‘traditional’ buyer had made the purchase,” the lawsuit said. FTX is not named as a defendant.
I have to ask once again, how the fudge did this guy fool all the smart EAs and Bay Area rationalists into being his cheerleaders? I think this is one of those cases where a dumb idiot like me would have said "this is too good to be true, also buying monkey pictures is stupid" but the smart people got fooled with "shh, it's all Bayesian calculation and the blockchain and crypto! Crypto is the future!" besides him throwing money at liberal causes (the Carrick Flynn election attempt will live in my heart for aye).
The Sequoia Capital interview will never fail to be a thing of beauty and a joy forever:
The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior.
HereAndGone2
12d ago
you can just print a giga yachts for anyone with the raw materials
That is where the sticking point is. How do I get the raw materials? Joe the guy with no job (AGI and robots automated it away) and no stocks (because he didn't get in to buying stock in the AI firms/never had the upbringing where you buy stocks) and no backup fortune is dependent on UBI (if all goes well) to live. Where does Joe, out of his UBI, get the gold, steel, energy and so forth to print a gigayacht?
When I read the handwaving about post-scarcity and AGI can just pull all this out of thin air, it does sound more akin to the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes than reality as we currently have it set up. Maybe AGI will change the world so that the guy living on a rubbish tip in a Third World slum can now access the same private beaches, luxury mansions, and gigayachts as Jeff Bezos - or maybe not.
You can accuse AI industry people of many things, but not having thought about this kind of thing really isn't one of them.
I do think there's an unconscious bias there where the thinking is predicated on "people like us, guys I know who work with me, my social bubble" and not "the guy who drives the bin lorry" because they don't understand what it's like to live in that socio-economic class.
HereAndGone2
12d ago
Am I understanding this correctly, is the NFT not really "you can sit in this particular seat" because there's one seat but a zillion tokens? or is there some item that backs up the NFT so that you could cash it in or translate it into physical assets?
HereAndGone2
12d ago
That's the bit I don't understand. You buy a Rolex, you have a Rolex. Yes, it's ridiculous that we are paying for the branding, but the whole aura of luxury goods is involved with the reputation for quality built up (and we saw the reverse with Burberry, where their reputation as stuffy upper class brand nose-dived once they started selling to chavs, though it seems their sales soared, so that's one example of where taking a brand downmarket paid off).
Buying a certificate that says "You own a picture of a Rolex" is what does not make sense to me.
HereAndGone2
13d ago
I think where the faith part comes in is "and that won't change the economy so radically that money won't work the same way".
If I'm producing houses (for example) that only cost $500 to build, I'm hoping to sell or rent them at market prices, which means I make a profit of X000%. But that relies on "then I sell that house to Joe and Mary who work jobs that mean they can get the mortgage for $200,000 to buy that house". If Joe and Mary aren't working any more because the same AI has taken their jobs, then there may still be a market for housing, but the price has to come down to $500 or $600, that is, be within the range of income they now have.
I think people are still stuck on the idea of "costs down, but sales prices stay the same" because they haven't really incorporated it into their world view that consumer demand may remain the same, but ability of consumers to pay those prices will drastically decline because much fewer people are in the jobs generating high enough income levels because AGI has replaced those jobs.
So if UBI is the way forward, then the owners of the AGI industries are going to pay for that via taxation, which means they are going to (1) have to sell their $500 house for as close to $500 as they can get, not the current house prices and (2) they're just transferring the money from one hand to the other, since the money to buy the house comes from the UBI they are being taxed to pay.
I honestly don't think we're managing to imagine the world of employment altered so drastically by the 'AGI means pennies on the dollar labour costs' dream, and the subsequent effect this will have on the economy. Nobody is selling superyachts to the dwellers of favelas, and you can't (currently) run an economy on superyacht sales to billionaires alone.
And seemingly now we're talking megayachts versus superyachts. Up to gigayachts? But even there, the superyacht global market is estimated to reach $45 billion by 2032, while current USA economy is valued at $30 trillion. So how are we going to replace all that consumption when fewer people have real disposable income from work anymore?
HereAndGone2
13d ago
I know this is an aside, but can anyone explain NFTs to me in a way that makes sense? I look at things like the linked article and I still can't figure out why anyone thought they were a good idea or even a workable idea. There must be some steelmanned case for "this is what they can be used for", I just haven't stumbled across it. 'Here's a thing that's totally digital. You can own a piece of it, except you won't own it. It's more like you have a licence for it. Yeah, just like paying Microsoft that subscription fee every month. But you can still make money off it by...' and that's the step where I break down.
If I squint, I can see that "I pay for the right to pixel number three thousand of this digital image" is kinda like owning a limited edition engraving or print. Fine. But it's still not the original. Maybe I can sell my print and get the price or even a bit more for it, but it's not the original drawing that is still in the artist's possession and that holds all the value. If the token is non-fungible, then my pixel three thousand can't be replaced by a swapped-in pixel.
Except it can? Or am I completely stupid? I can sell my token for money because nobody else can own a token like it. It's like selling a house.
But I can own a house to sell. I can't own the original digital piece of art that I'm selling my token from. Or can I?
This is what I'm struggling to understand.
HereAndGone2
15d ago
Honey bun, I grew up with no running water and my mother washing clothes for a family of six by hand. Don't tell me I have no idea about the difficulties of past labour, it wasn't in the past so far as I and the neighbours around me were concerned.
There's still a lot of work to be done in households now; we expect washing to be done regularly, not just on one specific day. The house should be cleaned every day, not just once a week or longer intervals where you would take up carpets. All the modern conveniences did take the physical labour out of things, but there is still work to be done. And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available". Just as mechanisation in the office did not mean "gosh, now I can get all the letters typed in the morning that used to take all day to write by hand, I can go home at twelve o'clock now with my work day over!" but rather "now there is even more work to be done because now instant replies to letters is the new expectation", so with housework.
Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives, and that's just one of the 'expansion of expectations' - now you have to manage all the extracurriculars your child/children should be doing, for one thing.
Speaking of, what the heck is going on with Jasmine Crockett? First she gets beat by the white guy which clearly has to be down to racist misogynoir, right? and now there's some possible scandal over a former security guy of hers turning out to be a criminal impostor who just got shot by the cops?
I see she's another one touched by the guiding hand of Kamala:
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