PreformancePertension
No bio...
User ID: 187
PreformancePertension
1mo ago
I guess that's a valid question these days - do we even want national legislators to represent a specific geography? My big-city House rep I can see is a party line liberal; that represents the district and I don't begrudge it, but when I look up her votes the single thing she broke with the party on was HR3633 (cryptocurrency regulation framework). I look up her social media, and 90% of her posting is on national issues, boosting other national politicians, Gaza, etc. My impression is that the idea of truly local representation has been broken for a while and that this dates back to the late 00s with the start of political nationalization and the decade-long earmark ban.
PreformancePertension
1mo ago
I'll admit that that was exactly the article I was thinking of; I rounded off the 11,000 member proposal just for convenience's sake, even though it probably shouldn't scare anyone here.
PreformancePertension
1mo ago
Good geographic district boundaries wouldn't matter if we expanded the House properly. The entire need to mess around with district borders is downstream of them being so huge that the decision has to be made, but fundamentally there's no good reason why the House shouldn't have a membership in the thousands, and it's the most straightforward solution we could have to a number of issues; it wouldn't require overturning SCOTUS precedents, it wouldn't require overturning CRA district rules (the smaller districts would be easy to make compliant), we wouldn't have to spend years in a domestic political fight about whether Americans would go for multi-member districts, and so on.
PreformancePertension
1mo ago
Another thing that happened in the .com era was the telecom bubble - massive build-outs of broadband and other internet transmission lines across the country that would turn a profit any day now as the internet took off. The internet did not take off on pace and a number of companies lost their shirts, but the infrastructure was already there and turned out to be highly profitable a decade later. I suppose I'm not sure I understand AI enough to know how much continuing investment the models might need in the future, but you can see a world in which one or more major AI companies go bust, and that frees up their models now that the cost of capital is sunk into bankruptcy, and they go on to be widely used.
PreformancePertension
3mo ago
Would just like to thank you for writing all this up about a world some of us rarely see.
PreformancePertension
11mo ago
How much posting on subreddits like that do you really think is organic and how much do you think is trying to spin up male attention? I'm not going to rule out the former but I'm going to mostly bet on the latter.
PreformancePertension
11mo ago
My general feelings are the same as his, and I would have quite happily voted for Desantis in the first Newsom and Newsom in the second - preferably Desantis first, but Newsom at least can tell which way the wind is blowing on the occasional issue, while Harris seems happy to roll the 2020 tape until it runs out beneath her.
PreformancePertension
1yr ago
Yes, it's very strange. The idea of her being a sort of Fremen nationalist along with her younger friends never really lands, and since that and being into Paul are essentially her only personality traits, it's unconvincing; she only gets to show off the first in one scene where it's little more than complaining Stilgar is old and religious. But I think this was fixable if you added just one scene and slightly changed another: Stilgar should be explaining to Jessica that the traditionalists are waiting for the Mahdi to start the terraforming project, while Chani in a separate scene with Paul can be advocating for starting the program on their own, especially as Paul starts to roll back Harkonnen control.
With Singaporean integration, everyone had to integrate. The Anglo-Singaporean culture represented by LKY, S. Rajaratnam, etc, was foreign to the Chinese as the Malays and Indians. Now, Anglo-Singaporeanism is primarily a creation of the Chinese elite, sure, but housing was part of a package of military service, language and education reform, so on, that deserves to be analyzed as a type of internal colonization. The plan was cooked up by an elite intentionally seeking to suppress racial conflict and that had used questionably-legal means to suppress opposition and other civil society. Politically infeasible in other countries? Today's Singapore couldn't even do it - in today's politics you can see other technocratic, hard-headed but unpopular policies like open immigration and explicitly pro-corporate liberalism are starting to bend and buckle under public pressure. Specific to housing, Singapore has always sold property as 99-year leaseholds with rights reverting back to the government. This is a ticking time bomb under the government as the first generation of housing blocks start nearing that date, and the buildings are wearing out earlier than then - the next decade or two is going to have a large wave of these repossessions. We'll see how the government deals with that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was extremely populist compared to past policy.
PreformancePertension
2yr ago
Amherst's economics department is fairly infamous for being left-wing/Marxist.
(Source: some shit I saw on twitter but don't remember the exact account anymore)
I saw someone float the idea that gays now understand straight men much less well since it's easy to be out. A lot of gay men who work in Democratic politics have probably grown up in costal cities where being out has always been ok among everyone they interact with, and their social circles are either progressive men or other gay men. It seems fairly plausible at a glance but I wouldn't have much input beyond that.
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