netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
That proof is incomplete. What if “evenly matched” is a really wide band? What if there’s uncertainty? You could be stuck waiting for “other causes” indefinitely. Liberalism is about extracting the most value from those stalemates.
I think our world favors stalemates. “God made Men; Sam Colt made them equal.” That lets me honestly say that it doesn’t have to end in stomping. We can make it too expensive to purge the heretics just like we made it too expensive to invade Germany.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
He technically still uses his account here, but only to post his substack links and argue in the comments. Guy got enough traction in the Twittersphere to make money, I guess.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
I think you’d have to draw a really strange category to exclude all the deeply ethnic conflicts. There was plenty of Slav- or Jew- or Walloon- or Catalonian-hating going on.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Wow. Terrible efficiency. All that money, and we didn’t even topple one government?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Motte, meet Bailey.
The more qualifiers one adds, the easier it is to defend, and the less significant. At some point it’s just six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Those are good questions, and you’re probably correct that SS won’t bother to address them.
I still must ask you to leave off the personal antagonism.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Huh. I thought the rifle was destroyed by one of the sniper’s shots.
This is one of those things which SHOULD have continued to get public attention, but has been swept under the rug since November, if not earlier.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
I’d put money against it being intentional. You’d need 1) a conspiracy in the SS which 2) acts once and only once and 3) gets lots of people fired but not charged with treason.
No, I think they probably hit a common failure mode in project management. It’s easy to skimp on testing scenarios which are rare, even if they’re really critical. Presidential assassins are rare, and FPOTUS assassins even more so. I would bet they got complacent and didn’t do the kind of training or testing they’d need to actually secure the site.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Those seem like pretty plausible numbers. I agree that he’s definitely not in the bottom 6% of health. He’s not even close on weight; he’s like 60th, 70th percentile. So not the highest risk for cardiovascular. And I expect screening to rule out all sorts of possible stealth risks.
I wonder what the actuarial tables look like for sudden death. I don’t know how I’d search for that.
Assassination risk is a whole different ball game. He’s probably more hated that any president since…Nixon? But that’s only loosely coupled with actual assasssination attempts. It’s also not a good predictor of defensive measures. Makes me a little curious if the government cuts involve cleaning house for the Secret Service…
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
That’s what I was looking at. Number of lives at 83 over number at 79 should be percent surviving.
How’d you figure?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
In concert with the other top-level discussions of betting, how about a topic which will definitely be uncontroversial:
Will Trump survive his full term?
No, I’m not talking about assassination. Curve-fitting the 4/45 former Presidents killed in office, the 4/59 terms ended by assassins, or the 4/236 years with assassinations? That’s a fool’s errand. It’s time for actuarial tables.
The President is 78 years and 7 months old. This gives a baseline 5-6% chance of death for the year, climbing towards 8% when he leaves office. He’d have a cumulative chance of death, during that period, of about 24%.
But Trump is not in the same position as the average American. He’s overweight or slightly obese, giving him a higher share of the risk for heart disease and stroke. He’s not a smoker, reducing various cardiovascular and cancer risk factors. He doesn’t drink, which further reduces his cancer and stroke risk but somehow raises his overall risk. Some of these factors, like cancer, are going to be mitigated by the planet’s best medical care. (You’d better believe that Trump is getting the best colonoscopy. The biggest.) Others are harder to screen or treat. I have no idea how to assess them holistically, and further data are welcome.
Still. 24% chance that this Presidency ends with conspiracy theories about stroke guns.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Right. Not just the Austrians, I think; my high school Econ class was very Keynesian, but I’m pretty sure it used the same definition.
Regardless:
Next, I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices.
The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.
I think tariffs stand in opposition to this layman’s understanding of inflation because they suppress the supply of consumer goods. If there’s a mechanism by which they do boost supply, or if they actually help the Austrian money-supply definition, I want to hear about it!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Sharing your opinion on a group is fine. Generalizing to what “almost nobody” thinks, or drawing conclusions about “many of these people,” is not.
You’ve been banned for this exact behavior before. On the other hand, you’ve been relatively good for the better part of a year. I’m going to go with a 1 day ban as a reminder to be more precise and charitable, even about people who are trying to be edgy.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
I have yet to see a good justification for how they're supposed to be compatible with fighting inflation. Instead, they look like more of the same "make it so" Trump policymaking that I've been complaining about since 2016, and I expect to see a good dose of leopards eating faces. But maybe that's just me.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
You’re eloquent and capable. Of course you could.
The time and effort it would take to do so provides a nice limiting factor on 1) how many walls you generate and 2) how invested you are in the ensuing discussion. It’s the same reason we frown on blogspammers.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Man. I think we had an account with that name on here somewhere. Wonder if he got himself banned?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
This post should satisfy our rules.
It would have done so if you’d stopped after “….and I think this is what we’re starting to see now.” You’ve got a thesis with enough meat to both defend and attack. That’s enough for a good discussion.
Adding a link to a (human) essay or article would have been fine. Adding a link to your generated essay would have been fine. The problem arose when you included said essay in the comment body. You promoted it from a source to be discussed to the discussion itself.
There is a limited tolerance for walls of text. AI makes it too easy to exceed that tolerance. In the interest of our signal to noise ratio, we ask that AI essays be kept out of sight by default.
Host it on pastebin. Put it in a collapsed-by-default quote block, if we have those. Users should be able to opt in to reviewing and discussing the essay just like they would for any other source.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Thank you for illustrating the crux of the argument.
Please don’t do it again. Pig, mud, etc. etc.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
“Recent”?
Anyway, consider the possibility that Twitter is overstating the prevalence of AI torture-porn for the usual engagement reasons.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
And how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, anyway?
From the outsider’s view, the unreasonableness isn’t exactly limited to folk paganism.
It always worked. Sectarian revolts predate Christianity, let alone the Enlightenment. The Romans lost cities to chariot racers.
Edit: my mistake—the Nika riots were in 532 AD. I think they still support the general point, but I guess another example would be better. Maybe Rome’s Social War?
Comparable information for Texas can probably be found here. Not something I can really explore on my phone, though.
We’ve got an interesting case for two reasons. First, the infamous Texas Interconnection. Our link to the rest of the country is highly limited, which keeps us away from certain federal regulations. Second, we had a moderate disaster back in 2021 when that infrastructure groaned under winter weather. Over 200 people died, making Texans much more aware of our grid than the average American.
Here’s Senator Ted Cruz leaving his constituency for a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Cancun. Naturally, this was completely forgiven by the time he faced reelection.
Texas did pass bills subsidizing on-demand generation, though I do believe one of them was actually regulating a different initiative out of existence. This is probably a good thing, and we’ll probably be ready for whatever natural disaster hits next. Either way, Republicans will see no electoral consequences whatsoever.
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