fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
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User ID: 3415
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
12hr ago
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
They have, continuing a trend that started over a year ago
I would like to present one of ChatGPTs greatest works, it's also like chatGPT 3 or 3.5, so it's basically an archeological text at this point.
Shooty shooty pew pew pew!
Let’s all learn what guns can do!
Liberals in the USA
Love to nod their heads and say,
“You bought your guns from a store!
You can’t fight a civil war!
Fight the army, you will lose!
They have jets and tanks to use!”
That’s not where the story ends!
They have homes, and kids, and friends!
Tyrants threaten you with bombs?
Just remember: they have moms!
You can’t live inside your jet!
Can we find you? Yes, you bet!
You’d send soldiers and marines
Up against AR-15s?
They’re outnumbered ten to one.
That is why I need a gun.
Don’t forget, because it’s true:
Government is scared of you.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
12hr ago
Have competent technocrats in positions of power? And then have them do competent things publicly
The Canadian liberals just did this pivot, although we'll see if they can follow through
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
12hr ago
I think his point here is that repeatedly having sex, if left to run it's natural course, will result in a baby.
So repeatedly having sex and always using birth control means you've deviated from the natural course in a way that prevents a baby from growing up
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
12hr ago
don't have premarital sex
How is convincing western populations not to do this going?
Follow up question, does abstinence only sex education show any efficacy in preventing pregnancies?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
13hr ago
Because 1 clearly doesn't work?
Remember all the abstinence only culture war stuff in the late 2000s / early 2010s?
Pretty sure abstinence only sex ed resulted in the highest rates of teenage pregnancy
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
13hr ago
No, it shows PP with 4% odds, when he had 1% moments before, and the newspapers had all called the election against him.
This screenshot was sent in a group chat as we talked shit about the election, not saved to specifically document the timeline of odds.
You don't have to believe me if you don't want to.
You could even probably dig into the comment section of the market and find all the people saying "hold the line" if you were so inclined.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
20hr ago
Yeah I went and looked too and couldn't find it, I just remembered I have a screenshot.
It's the resolution of the graph, can't see it.
The Trump vs Kamala odds stayed irrational for a significant chunk of election day. A guy in my office worked out an arbitrage play between one of the sites and Kalshi that worked on the math. Unfortunately he couldn't execute because one of them required you to be a US citizen.
Trumps odds were also inflated vs the polling for a while, driven I think theoretically by a French millionaire (if I remember correctly) who was dumping large sums into Trump bets.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Edited my comment to be more clear.
This was ~30 mins around midnight after the voting stations closed and after every major news organization had called the election against him.
Like the election was over, he had lost. His odds were <1% because every major newspaper had come out and said "we are calling it, Carney has won". But then the boys rallied and moved the needle for a bit.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
As so often, attack precedes defense.
I actually think drones have been a bigger win for Ukraine than Russia.
The longer a Russian attack takes and the further into Ukrainian lines they get, more and more drones get vectored onto their attacking troops. And it's hard to suppress them, so every Russian attack inevitably gets bogged down. They cannot for the life of them generate a breakthrough.
Otherwise, spot on analysis.
According to Polymarket Eric Adams has a slim but present chance of holding his seat.
While in general I think betting markets are a useful(ish) signal. They are ludicrously irrational when it comes to political odds.
I am not a gambler by nature, so I haven't dabbled, but both the Trump v Kamala and the recent Canadian Election had essentially free money bets available during the election hysteria.
At one point very briefly, Pierre Poilievre's odds of winning went from <1% to 5% for ~30 mins around midnight after the voting stations closed and after every major news organization had called the election against him. The reason? "Poilievre bros" were "rallying" and "holding the line against the lib-tards". They were literally throwing money away, I regretted not having an account in that moment.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Truthfully, that was kind of a rhetorical question because I believe in and fully agree with everything you just said.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
I wrote this in a longer comment but to be clear I'm not saying ICE or splashy deportations are totally useless. Optics and messaging do matter.
My thesis is that they scale poorly, and the fact the government is prioritizing "high optics low scale" options and ignoring "lower optics high scale" options means they won't make a substantial dent in the 11-13 million illegals in your country.
And the fact they aren't simultaneously using all available options for maximum effectiveness means it's a safe bet they don't really want to fix this as much as they say they do.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Sounds like a great way for them to get smoked in elections
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
I think "bring the hammer down on the companies" accomplishes this
If in 4 years, the Dems come back to power and open the immigration flood gates, but the jobs immigrants used to do are now done by Americans, people will lose their fucking minds over the direct connection between immigrants and job losses.
Right now this is more subtle because of you replace an illegal Mexican farm hand with an illegal Guatemalan farm hand, no one bats an eye. If you replace an American farm with with a Guatemalan farm hand, the American can go on fox news and tank the Democratic polling
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Saying "evidence" and then linking the New York Post is maybe not the most credible way of doing that.
That article did link to better articles, although both of them didn't link or substantiate their underlying data
In a year or two we'll know who's telling the truth on this
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Main query: Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?
It's stupid theatrics. A lazy google shows they've deported approx. 200,000 people in six months, at approx. $17,000ish a pop.
If we assume 12 million illegal immigrants (range I saw was 11-13), that's a cool 30 years at the current rate with a cost of $200.6 billion (not including 30 years of inflation). You could obviously hire more people to speed it up, and maybe that would result in the same (or lower) per deportation cost from economies of scale, etc. Although as you picked the low hanging fruit immigrants, the remaining ones would probably get savvier so unlikely but whatever.
Instead, you could crack down massively on American business owners who I'd like to remind the crowd, GIVE THE IMMIGRANTS MONEY EVERY WEEK IN EXCHANGE FOR LABOR, ALLOWING THEM TO STAY IN YOUR COUNTRY. I truly don't understand how everyone hates immigrants and not also the traitorous Americans who enable them??
Just implement e-verify, it's that easy. Crack down HARD on a few businesses who you catch skirting this (you can even do it in California to whip up the base) and the illegal immigrants will deport themselves once they run out of money and can't get a new job. You could even set up free busses back to Mexico or something.
Once you show businesses you're not fucking around they'll wise up quick. Or even better, their debt and equity financiers will do it for you. Every bank credit risk department is going to start looking really closely at your hiring practices if you want a loan for your farm, because they don't want to risk you going bankrupt when Uncle Sam eviscerates your business for hiring illegal immigrants. There's also way less businesses than illegals, and they're all registered with multiple government bodies, so this is less legwork too.
The fact they're cracking down on a relative handful of illegal immigrants instead of the much higher leverage option of the people who give them money should tell you what the priorities are here. Illegal immigrants are responding to their incentives, which are "come to America, get a job, make way more than you did at home". So take away the job...
If they were serious about this, they'd make everyone use the solution they already invented, e-verify.
I'm not saying you don't need ICE, there will be people who won't leave. But if you don't fix the system of incentives that makes them come here you're not actually serious.
See also, Trump literally said they weren't going to enforce it for farm and hotel labour. "We're super serious about illegal immigration guys but shucks the hotel lobbyists made some great points..." Farms at least feed people, but hotels? Lmao, they're just not serious people.
Putting everything else aside, flexing your upvote count on someone is profoundly cringe
Especially as this site has a pretty strong ideological bias, and like literally every website with voting, voting is 100% indicative of in-group/out-group agreement/disagreement and is largely unrelated to comment quality
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