VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
The VRA and related court precedent demands a mutually-contradictory set of requirements on drawing districts. That Gordion knot is maybe going to be (partially?) untied by the current Louisiana case.
Although my personal thinking is that eliminating geographic districting in favor of something more like slate-of-candidates parliamentary systems is probably the cleanest of the available options. None are perfect, though.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
I have a corner of the extended family that includes a man who, after his kids were grown, divorced his wife and remarried someone slightly older than his kids and had a full second family. They are nice folks that clearly love each other and I like them, but I can tell it's been rough on them in various ways due to the age gap: the dad hit (practical) retirement age while the youngest kids (one with special needs) were still in middle school, and I know the wife has had to start working, presumably to close the budget. I know she's been having to take care of him (now in his 80s) physically too since before the last kid left the house, and I can't help but occasionally think about how she's actuarially likely to be widowed in maybe her early 60s, and how she'll handle that long-term.
Nothing against them personally, but I think they'd have been happier overall if they were closer to the same age and met earlier. I wish them well, though. Life throws things like that at you sometimes. I hope it goes well for the GP here, too.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5hr ago
the power of Holocaust as a story is weakening
When I was a kid, the Holocaust was still in living memory enough that tattooed survivors were showing up to school classrooms to tell their personal stories. At the time, the last WWII vets were retiring and still alive to tell their stories. The entire era there is passing out of living memory and I suppose it isn't surprising that the emotional and political valence of those events is changing as the torch is passed.
I don't think it was ever possible to maintain that story forever: it's hard to sell multigenerational grievances generally, and worse when the aggrieved party seems to be doing "mostly fine, actually" (opinions may vary) in the present.
But I do look at these changing attitudes and wonder what will happen in the next decades as other traumas fade in the collective memory. We're already seeing politicians first elected during the civil rights movement dying in office in their 80s, for example, and Vietnam veterans aren't as able to get out and protest as numerously as they used to.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
blacklivesmatter
Sometimes it amazes me that the BLM crowd is so content to throw their weight behind the Palestine crowd, elements of which are also funding actual genocides of Black people in Sudan and Nigeria. But the self-centered-ness of the political activist class isn't that surprising, I guess.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The idea that AI would need a detailed world model seems to run contra to the "It became self-aware at 2:14 AM Eastern Time" doomsaying. Skynet wasn't supposed to be rate-limited by interactive world manipulation.
And honestly I haven't seen as much motion as I'd expect on the world interaction front. Where are my automatic burger flipping robot arms? There are lots of thankless low-skill (but not no-skill) jobs in at least the food industry (meat packing, for example) that have pretty bounded motion and requirements, but I haven't seen anywhere near as much motion in those areas as I would have expected.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I don't know enough about movie script copyright to know the exact details.
Given a time machine, you can just plop proof of the existence of the work before Disney created it and claim it (perhaps pseudonymously) as your own. Bonus points for doing it in the most embarrassing way possible: "it has come to light that Disney plagiarized the script for The Force Awakens from a 1992 Usenet post of the same title to alt.stories.starwars, which got one reply to the tune of 'lolz that's some terrible fanfic, man' at the time."
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
It is at least weird to me that Trudeau is dating Russell Brand's ex-wife. But I've never seen anyone else comment on that specific angle.
Everyone always talks about "Medicare for all", but "Medicaid for all" is probably more achievable: people with existing insurance options probably aren't going to drop it en masse because it's definitely a downgrade in provider selection (read: quality) and availability. Heck, more than half of Medicare beneficiaries now opt to use those dastardly insurance companies as intermediaries rather than traditional Medicare.
But I haven't tried to figure out the costs of doing this, this post is mostly an observation that the two nominally-similar services have different valences with the nation and politicians.
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