benmmurphy
3mo ago
there is also potentially something weird with USD inflation. i've heard a large proportion of physical US currency (up to 50%) is held overseas. however, i'm not sure what % of the higher money supply is held by foreigners. its possible that foreigners could be helping to pay for a significant portion of seniorage which incentivises the US government and US voters to inflate the money supply.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
there is a good summary here as well: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/morgpie-topless-twitch-livestream
benmmurphy
1yr ago
don't mess with chicken or pork when it comes to cooking
benmmurphy
5mo ago
riots are just a schelling point for dickheads
benmmurphy
1mo ago
Even if the petitioners win is it going to meaningfully impact what the government can do or are they just going to find work arounds like in the affirmative action decision. Presumably, the government is allowed to write to a newspaper and say I disagree with this OpEd/article here is our opinion on the matter as long as they make no demands or threats. Now if the courts say to the government you are not allowed to make requests for censorship then the government has the option to just ping the social media companies saying, "BillyBob made this post stating X our opinion is Y". Certainly, this is an improvement but maybe the end result ends up being the same with social media companies assuming there is some kind of implicit threat or demand. Though, I think some of the requests were already using a dodge around explicit censorship. For example they were saying, "BillyBob made this post stating X and this appears to violate your terms of service". So not explicitly asking them to censor BillyBob but bringing to the attention of the company that BillyBob may have been violating the terms of service for the social media site. If the court comes up with something to prevent this then maybe it will also be a solution to other work arounds the government might come up with.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
coincidentally massie is talking about the pipe bomb on his twitter again: https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1750114583476404350 and 5 days ago blaze media are claiming the person who found the pipe bomb at the DNC was a plains clothes capitol police officer.
benmmurphy
7mo ago
Seems a bit like positivism/normativism. This is the current state of the world I think the optimal behaviour is X is not endorsing the current state of the world.
benmmurphy
1yr ago
SoS claimed there was 10,200 petition sheets. i'm sure after they have finished properly reviewing all the signatures they will find the missing ones that weren't part of the initial count.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
its interesting that part 2 mentions the pipe bombs. the fake pipe bombs were very weird. apparently, they were placed the night before and there is video of someone suspected of placing of the bombs but one of them (or both?) used a 60 minute kitchen timer as the pretend detonation source. now, its gets weirder because apparently someone 'found' one of the bombs at a point in time where the timing made it look like it would explode around the time of certification. this was partly covered by an interview in congress: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/republicans-release-new-information-january-6-pipe-bomb-investigation and FBI Director Wray's testimony: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DaL5RM-ZYt0 the cell phone data from the area was also mysteriously corrupted which impeded any investigation.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
that's a very cheeky opinion by the court. they find that the 14th amendment doesn't apply to Trump so there is no finding against Trump but then include a bunch of disparaging stuff about him that will never been challenged on an appeal. but this courts opinion on Brandenburg would not be held up by higher courts. they even include a case where the plain language used by the accused was much worse than Trump and the the accused was not convicted but then magically read further than the plain language of Trump to find that he did commit insurrection.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
I enjoyed the bit where Hollywood cashed in twice
benmmurphy
1mo ago
ubiquitous TLS + ESNI/ECH does make it harder to perform some forms of censorship. for example if someone controlling the network wants to ban you from a particular site hosted on cloudflare or another CDN then they will need to ban ESNI/ECH connections to the whole of the CDN. more people using TLS/etc increases the collateral damage from certain blocking technologies.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
i thought this was referred to as 'mood affiliation' in some circles but i'm not sure if that's the right term. maybe it's just confirmation bias. see: https://www.econlib.org/mood-affiliation-or-confirming-evidence/
benmmurphy
5mo ago
The federal case against Trump seems to boil down to if you challenge an election then you have to be correct or you are going to jail. That doesn't seem to be a good precedent to set. He is being prosecuted for things that are entirely legal and people have done before in the past and have not been prosecuted for.
i guess it depends on what you mean by rates. if you compare the ratio ([W rapes W] / [W rapes B]) against ([B rapes B] / [B rapes W]) then you would expect the ratios to be out of whack. but if you compare (W rapes B) against (B rapes W) then these should be the same numerically because it takes 2 to tango so the ratios in the final equations are the same but just ordered differently. but i guess if you doing something like dividing (W rapes B) and (B rapes W) by population numbers of the offender (or victim) then you are going to get ratios that are out of whack because the numerators should be the same but will have different denominators. but i'm not sure what the justification for doing this division would be...
A worked example:
Using this population ratio:
A: 3/4
B: 1/4
Where the population is made of of 50% rapists who rape from the population randomly:
A_r: 3/8
B_r: 1/8
A_r_A: 3/8 * 3/4 = 9/32
A_r_B: 3/8 * 1/4 = 3/32
B_r_A: 1/8 * 3/4 = 3/32
B_r_B: 1/8 * 1/4 = 1/32
BrA is 3x more likely than BrB
whereas
ArB is 3x less likely than ArA
but A_r_B == B_r_A
benmmurphy
1yr ago
This twitter dude sounds like a compulsive liar / fantasist. I don't think they can help themselves and they say the most absurd unbelievable shit and I think most of the time the people around them either enjoy the stories or tolerate it so they don't usually get meaningful pushback.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
Maybe they used something like this: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/natural-family-planning/
benmmurphy
1yr ago
I don't understand why the Biden administration didn't try to pass this as law while the Democrats controlled congress.
benmmurphy
2mo ago
It will also be interesting to see what happens to Couy Griffin (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/17/new-mexico-insurrectionist-fourteenth-amendment). I think these courts making 14th amendment decisions are screwed up. If there is either federal or state law that makes certain things a crime and punishment for that crime is that you lose the ability to hold office then I think that's fine. But courts making these decisions without a proper criminal trial with the opportunity for a jury and proper standards of evidence is broken. If you have a friendly judge you can basically remove someone from office for attending a protest where they have committed trespassing crimes.
benmmurphy
7mo ago
There is a lot of game theory based around this. Stuff like schelling points or when private knowledge is mysteriously transferred to shared or public knowledge due to action or inaction. There are a bunch of neat brain teaser puzzles based on this.
benmmurphy
1yr ago
did the suicide nets lower suicides or did people just use another method? i would expect they did lower them somewhat because presumably it increases the cost of suicide at the margin. but i guess if there are good substitute options then it might not have much of an effect.
teaching stuff in the school that reflects negatively on certain groups is always going to be tricky. it seems like it is an instance of the [Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers problem] (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/). you can imagine kids being subjected to an avalanche of facts that reflect negatively on a particular group and then when challenged the people who set the curriculum claim these are just facts and you are anti-history. Then there is also the duality that if someone doesn't like some facts being taught they can claim its a 'Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers' problem.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
It’s probably based off some narrow technical claim from an agency that is true. For example I’m guessing the number of electronic voting machines with no paper trail has decreased. So if you have a bunch of things you have been trying to improve and they have all improved since the last election and are the best they have ever been then you can claim it is the most secure ever. There might be other things that you don’t measure that have been going in a negative direction but because they aren’t part of the improvement plan they don’t exist.
benmmurphy
9mo ago
That article claimed Russia was openly waiting for Ukraine fatigue to set in but never provided any evidence to back this statement. Funnily enough the author of the article seems to be the disinformation Mary Poppins.
i thought 42 might have been a deliberate reference but it looks like they invited 43 and there was a no show. i'm sure these numbers are just coincidences and not deliberate numerology.
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