cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
1yr ago
That does raise the problem that some people don't post in megathreads, because they want more eyes on their post. When they are officially sanctioned megathreads it makes sense for the mods to encourage people to use them. But we aren't gonna do that if just anyone posts a megathread.
cjet79
1yr ago
I had that feeling in my early career, settling down, marrying, and having kids has helped.
I also wrote an online story for a while and it got a good following, having people actively appreciate what I was doing felt better than just getting paid to do a job.
cjet79
1yr ago
I feel like as long as I have been paying attention to elections there have been screwups by the major parties that should have had them disqualified from major state ballots.
Republicans are not barred from the General Election ballot in Colorado.
I should be more clear: it is always specific candidates that fail to meat some standard and should been off the ballot. Often times it is hilariously because they accidentally made the ballot requirements too strict in their continuing efforts to fuck over third parties, and they forgot to exempt themselves from it like they normally do. It is always the R or D next to their name that saves them.
Trump is barred form the Republican Primary ballot.
And I'll reiterate my point: I think it is unlikely to actually happen. I'm about 90% certain that Trump will be on the primary ballot in Colorado come election time. I will take a small token bet of 80% odds to that effect.
... But yeah, the two party duopoly absolutely conspire against third parties, and it's bad. Not too bad, though, since first past the post voting pretty much guarantees a two-party system at a macro level anyway, even without the thumbs on the scale. We need something like Approval voting to make third parties viable in single-winner elections.
First past the post voting guarantees a two-party system. It does not guarantee that those two parties must be the democrats and republicans. The laws and regulations do that.
I'd be happier with approval voting, but likely not by much. I'm not a huge fan of democracy anyways. Making democracy more efficient seems less important to me than making sure democracy can't vote on things I actually care about.
cjet79
1yr ago
If we are following demographics that closely ... once they have shifted in Israel won't the US will be a predominantly Mormon and Quaker country?
I have strong doubts about demographics as destiny. I don't think these religious communities with high birth rates are always all that great about holding onto all their kids.
There is also probably an effect over time that as these wayward kids bleedoff into the mainstream they create enclaves of ex-[minority religions], and it becomes even easier for future wayward kids to leave.
cjet79
1yr ago
Not sure how much this will really matter. I feel like as long as I have been paying attention to elections there have been screwups by the major parties that should have had them disqualified from major state ballots. Every time ... nothing happens. They are still on the ballot on election day.
However, if its a third party, and they don't cross every t and dot every i then they get kicked off the ballot in a heartbeat, and the courts will drag their feet on fixing it until the election has passed. The Libertarian party routinely spends a bunch of resources just being on the ballot in all fifty states. And if you have ever paid attention to any of their insider politics or complaints, there is almost always a new state law somewhere that has raised the requirements for third parties to be on the ballots. If there is one thing that republicans and democrats can agree on, it is that they dislike third parties.
cjet79
1yr ago
This is a bad top level post.
Next time please add more
- Analysis and explanation of how it is relevant to the culture war. (maybe an analysis of how one specific group has responded to these claims, the military, the media, the conspiracy community, etc)
- Your own opinion or a more specific jumping off point for discussion. (something more than "what do you think?")
I'm not saying you have to write paragraphs upon paragraphs. But you have zero sentences, there should be 1-3 sentences for each of those items.
cjet79
1yr ago
abandoning the legal fiction of "fleeing from violence" that the asylum seekers and traditional media use to justify the moral imperative of letting in economic migrants.
The "fleeing from violence" might have a legal definition, but I think most migrants are probably doing some form of fleeing from violence all the time. I think it is also strange that nationalists have glomed onto this as if it is some sort of mass lie.
There are different levels and types of "violence" and "fleeing". Violence can have terrible impacts on the economic conditions of an area, the stores are getting robbed or burned down, people's homes are being invaded, death is common enough that long-term self-improvement investments like education are a bad investment, etc etc. This can even describe some American cities. Imagine a young boy from that area, he keeps his head down, manages to avoid getting caught up with any gangs, and leaves as soon as he can afford a bus ticket out. He finds a job in another prospering city, and he sometimes sends some money back to his parents. He is an "economic migrant", but he was also most certainly fleeing violence.
Is something about that story unbelievable for some reason? Why the extreme levels of doubt? Don't you realize that people are fleeing American inner cities for the same reasons?
cjet79
1yr ago
I played it a little while back, enjoyed it for a little while.
Was the difficulty a setting, or just based on how far you are from the central place? I think difficulty was based on how far you went from the central tower thingy. If I remember correctly once your ramp up the difficulty, the game changes from "always winning" to "always losing". To the point where unless I got lucky roles on some starting races/abilities/map areas I felt better off just quitting the level and not wasting my time.
I'm a very sore loser when it comes to single player games, so I stopped playing after I stopped constantly winning. Definitely a reversal of the normal difficulty curve for rogue-lites.
I still played for about 20 hours, so I don't regret my purchase. Just wasn't the right game for me I guess.
cjet79
1yr ago
Haha, that would probably have the opposite of the intended effect. I'd not be opposed to a meetup in northern virginia if anyone is around though.
cjet79
1yr ago
Well yeah, that is a shit state to be in for guns.
Maybe try and live in one of the non gray areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_sanctuary
cjet79
1yr ago
Do you live in a large city? This is the only thing I can think of that would prompt this level of annoyance.
I own guns, I consider myself very pro second amendment, I don't know or honestly care that much about how difficult it is to get a gun in a city. My solution to them having shitty gun laws is to not go there. I'm also not in the habit of picking political fights for other people.
I'd love it if you explained to my wife that me owning guns is actually an intellectual pursuit. Right now she is under the mistaken impression that I'm just a big boy with disposable income and I'm buying big boy toys.
cjet79
1yr ago
I mean I guess my complaint is less about charity than accuracy. You seem wrong about your assessment. I guess I'm curious if I'm missing something big or you just wanted to shit on conservatives. Sounds like the latter though.
cjet79
1yr ago
Seem pretty uncharitable, maybe you mean just DC conservatives? Or city conservatives?
I've never lived in an area more dense than "suburban". And I can say I've never had a neighbor against gun rights. I've had plenty of liberal and democrat voting neighbors. Most of them have owned guns.
This issue has always seemed like a "rural vs urban" thing. Party lines have also tended to break down along those lines lately. But if I had to take a bet, I'd say the gun rights debate breakdown is better characterized by rural vs urban than it is by republican vs democrat.
cjet79
1yr ago
I had a very different experience working the India portion of tech company a few years back. Our company was considered an outlier though, and many other companies were often asking us "how do you get the India office to work so well for you".
From what I know, the secrets of success were actually very straightforward, but doing them is difficult.
The history:
The company started with a standard "outsourcing" by hiring a company in India to provide them with support workers. They quickly ran into quality issues. Anytime they found a good worker or support staff through this company, that worker would then go on to get a better job elsewhere. And the intermediary company often just made it difficult to keep using the same support staff.
The company decided this wasn't sustainable and didn't make sense. They opened up their own office in India, sent over a trusted Indian executive, and tasked that exec with building a functioning India office. A decade later those efforts seemed clearly successful. Their own stated reasons for success:
- A focus on hiring and retaining good talent. India has a large labor pool. Even if US immigration has a good filtering mechanism, its still going to leave plenty of conscientious and smart Indians back in India. Find those people, pay them well, and try to keep them.
- Mirrored offices. Meaning that the India office has a full company structure equalish to the main US office. Finance, HR, Legal, Support, Development, Sales, etc. There is something intangible about having access to the full support system of a corporate environment. Companies in the US have a specific structure often because that structure works and produces good results. It seems a little insane to think you can reproduce that success in another country by gutting the entire support structure.
- Inter office travel and connections. The executives in both America and India made it a point to have regular visits to the other office. Also managers and even low level workers could make the trip too. They created an infrastructure to support inter office travel, and it was low marginal cost to let low level employees use that same infrastructure. So I got to take a trip to the India office just 2 years into my career as a software developer. I had a driver, an apartment, a maid, a cook, and a phone all given to me. A 6 week trip, I was paid a per-diem, and given free meals, and given PTO for the travel hours. The real value from the company's perspective is that I stopped disliking my Indian coworkers as much. I understood more of the frictions they had interacting with the US office, and I found better ways to work around it.
They have a world-class support team at that company. American customers would call in and ask to speak to the India support team members sometimes. They had talented developers that managed to get visas through us and then go on to work at a FAANG company. They had quality engineers in India that were respected bloggers and thought leaders on quality engineering.
I feel like I'm selling an ad about the company. They talked this stuff up while I was there, but it was my first job and I just thought 'whatever, gotta talk yourself up, right?'. But no, it took me some more life experience to realize they were actually impressive and unique.
Its possible to have a good company in India, but I think there is going to be a real problem if you are just doing it as a random cost saving measure and not putting much thought into how it should be done.
cjet79
1yr ago
This was the basic idea behind one of Scott's old essays: Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness. Though applied to more issues than just speech.
cjet79
1yr ago
I do like meat, but I often run out of it at home, and have to get other foods to go with it at the store.
cjet79
1yr ago
I got diagnosed with diabetes a few years ago. I'm on medication, and I changed my lifestyle and eating habits. My A1c is within normal people range now.
It sucked getting used to it. I had multiple moments standing in my kitchen or in a grocery store trying to figure out what I can eat that doesn't taste like crap, and just feeling so defeated.
I don't practice meditation. I am a bit of a fan of stoicism as a philosophy. I have mostly adopted to the new lifestyle and it doesn't bug me as much. I think given time most people tend to bounce back to a base level of happiness. Consistently practicing a new habit until it is second nature helps a lot.
cjet79
1yr ago
ChatGPT doesn't even really rely on the LLM to not break copyright. You can get around copyright restrictions by just lying about what year it is, but then when it starts typing out copyrighted content a warning pops up and stops it. So it seemed like they just have a second dumb layer checking it. It seems like the dumb layer is a better protection for any explicitly banned text.
cjet79
1yr ago
I have to wonder how much the PC stuff just makes the AI worse. Not from being asked to deny reality or anything.Unless my understanding is wrong the usual approach to make them PC is to input a bunch of pre-commands before the user ever says anything. The more pre-commands needed, the less the user input matters, and the more that the AI has to keep track of answer wise.
cjet79
1yr ago
Does anyone perform cultural and free speech benchmarks on AIs? That is all I'm really interested in.
cjet79
1yr ago
archive links have been broken for me lately. I get stuck in "i am not a robot" tests indefinitely. Firefox, adblocker, and password manager. No idea which of those is screwing things up.
cjet79
1yr ago
[info about the ruling]
You have context.
Mother Jones, NPR, CBS, and Foreign Policy (of all the friggin' places) are running articles breathlessly proclaiming DOOM! for the US tax code, or at least the ability of Democrats to pass wealth tax laws.
You have analysis.
This Forbes article seems to be a pretty good explanation of what's at issue but I'll admit that I'm not well-versed enough in tax law to understand the full ramifications of what a Moore victory would mean for the ability of the federal government to raise revenue. On the other hand, I can't say I'm sad about the idea of a wealth taxes getting a bullet to the head. What am I missing or not considering as I read about this from the various outlets?
You have an opinion and a jumping off point for the discussion.
(Mods, let me know if I need to delete this and repost in Small Questions Sunday.)
Not necessary. From my perspective you have all the important parts required for a top level post. I'm mod tagging my comment just so people have some insight into how I judge top level posts. Having Context, Analysis, and a Jumping off point / Opinion is enough for a top level post. CAJO.
cjet79
1yr ago
Anyone else care to personally prognosticate?
Not me, but I appreciate the analysis. Aside from the most obvious party line predictions, I don't have any special insight into the supreme court. They seem mostly like a black box to me.
Any thoughts on the recently adopted code of conduct for the supreme court?
And did they ever find that leaker?
We do see the overall results of the user moderation, but not the specific votes. I'm not sure how zorba set up the calculations behind the scenes.
I think it's good that you are basically seeing what we have to do.
Leave alone vs warn vs temp ban vs permanent ban. The added complication for us is that we have to also write something to go along with a punishment decision. That does make me marginally less harsh as a mod. Especially if there are just lots of small things wrong. But it probably makes me more harsh when it's just one really bad thing in an otherwise ok post.
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