roystgnr
2mo ago
especially as the 14th amendment has made the states subordinate to that federal government.
The 14th has made the states subordinate to the Bill of Rights, but I wouldn't say that's the biggest step in state subordination. It was several decades earlier when the Supremacy Clause made states subordinate to the federal government in matters covered by the Constitution's short allowlist, and it wasn't until several decades later that cases like Wickard v. Filburn expanded federal powers from "short allowlist" to "do anything you feel like".
roystgnr
2mo ago
It just says "having previously taken an oath" - shouldn't that apply to former office-holders as well, even if their term(s) ended before the insurrection?
(still doesn't seem like it should have applied to Cox, who was neither a present nor former office-holder before the Civil War)
roystgnr
2mo ago
they were tall lanky things called 'Skinnies.'
Just to add context: these are the first enemies the protagonist is in combat against, but they switch sides and for most of the book the main conflict is the same as in the movie, humans-vs-bugs.
(for a loose definition of "the same"; e.g. in the book the humans are trying to capture a brain-bug so they can figure out how to communicate and negotiate peace rather than fight-to-the-genocide, whereas in the movie they want someone for Nazi Doogie Howser to torture)
[The Mobile Infantry] also jumped around with jump packs, powered armor and I think laser swords.
I was going to joke about you confusing Starship Troopers with Star Wars or Halo ... but I pulled down my copy to check, and what do you know, the protagonist cuts through a wall with "a knife beam at full power". I swear I just reread it a few years ago...
roystgnr
2mo ago
everything imaginable
When my father got cancer was the first time I discovered a very imaginable gap: long-term care. This turned out to be only a hypothetical problem in his case (there wasn't such a long interval between "brain damage sufficient to prevent living at home" and "brain damage sufficient to prevent living" after all...) but it's something to think about supplementary insurance for, despite how complete Medicare coverage is for so many other costs.
That's not to detract from the rest of your excellent point, though. His last several months of treatment had a price (at printed value; who knows what fraction of that was real cost vs weird provider-vs-insurer negotiation ploys) that would have bankrupted him out-of-pocket, but that was nearly free with Medicare plus a little supplementary insurance. Of course he still fought for every month, when it just took willpower rather than a life's savings otherwise aimed at his grandkids' college tuition, but if he'd had to weigh price vs benefits himself I wonder if he'd have turned it all down. (if he'd seen the future I'm sure he'd have just picked out cheap in-home hospice care instead, but the trouble with those "most medical care expense is in the last year of life" statistics is that you don't know it's going to be the last year without seeing the future)
roystgnr
2mo ago
Frequently what happens is that it gets comically enormous and useless as various stakeholders fill it with random bullshit.
Could you give any examples of "erroneous"? I've certainly seen "enormous"/"useless"/"random bullshit", and burying important truths in so much filler they get ignored might have consequences as bad as falsehoods, but I just don't recall seeing any likely falsehoods. Even the random bullshit is unevidenced rather than obviously untrue, along the lines of "let's put X in the list of possible side effects, as CYA, even though our only evidence for X is that in one study the treatment group reported it almost as often as the control group"...
roystgnr
2mo ago
"wouldn't", surely, unless you're really black-pilled even by TheMotte standards.
Officially the debt clause may make default tricky. Unofficially hyperinflation is just as "good" and still an option.
an alcoholic during a binge.
For an extra-close metaphor, imagine you're planning to try to collect the debt from the alcoholic's kids.
roystgnr
2mo ago
It's okay to just ping @self_made_human; he's cool.
A brief search suggests that SSRIs are generally safe with alcohol (IANAMD; please update your will and assign medical power of attorney before mixing any drugs with alcohol based on my advice) but the combination can still "lead to more pronounced effects of drunkenness", which sounds like it could be enough all alone, especially to new users who think they know their limits. And with MAOIs (are these still used often?) interactions range from "you may become drowsy and dizzy" to "dangerous spikes in blood pressure that may require immediate medical attention".
roystgnr
2mo ago
That's exactly what I was looking for; thank you!
2x is still more than I'd have guessed based on subsequent inflation (or M2 data, which seems to be applies-to-apples) alone. I wonder to what extent that means the Fed was partly fighting a natural permanent fall in the velocity of money, vs to what extent it means we still have more future inflation "baked in", vs to what extent it means I don't understand macroeconomics. Probably around 3%/2%/95%...
roystgnr
2mo ago
I'd like to see one that shows the pre-May-2020-definition and post-May-2020-definition versions of M1 as two separate lines. With this graph it's hard to tell how much growth is money printing, how much is savings pattern changes, and how much is just semantics. There's just a big gasp when you first see the big May 2020 jump, followed by a big meh when you read the "that part was all just semantics" fine print afterwards.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I always liked that, frankly. Someone gets to a point like "All prime numbers are odd; what are you, stupid?!", and the part of my brain that evaluates logic is still overriding the part of my brain that evaluates people so I reply with the obvious counterexample anyway, but then the downvote comes and it wakes me up and I drop the thread.
roystgnr
2mo ago
By your logic
This is usually a thought-terminating phrase
Where I come from we call it "proof by contradiction" and it's a fundamental tool of logic.
roystgnr
2mo ago
This is just a cynical, pessimistic, edgy hot take; come on!
It's correct, of course, but you should have kept going until you reached very cynical, very pessimistic, and very edgy. It's too optimistic to imply that the beancounters would at least fund the best projects if only they could figure out what those projects were! As counterexamples, I was just last week treated to multiple separate stories of this form: Researcher A1 working on Project A demonstrated that with a slight modification AA he could make Older Project B obsolete at a fraction of the cost, so researchers B1 through Bn managed to convince their shared superiors that A1 was stepping out of his lane, and either further work into AA got canceled or all of A got canceled for the sin.
I've of course heard the claim that "science advances one funeral at a time", but I'd imagined it only being applicable to great intellectual frameworks versus the difficulty of making large paradigm shifts, not to every little idea and technology versus the difficulty of finding something new to work on earlier than you'd planned.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Ah, Benford's Law. Great in other contexts, but here that one didn't pass the smell test for me; the "law" only applies if you're sampling from distributions spread over orders of magnitude, not voting districts drawn to be nearly equally sized multiplied by vote percentages centered around .5. I later learned there's a clever trick where you can look at later digits' distributions instead of the first digit's, but all the skeptics I saw in 2020 were just misapplying the basic version of the law.
I've seen final vote tallies that were obvious fakes from the numbers alone, but for elections like Saddam's or Putin's, not Trump's or Biden's.
I still heartily approve of trying to check, though. An election isn't just about getting the right result, it's also supposed to be about getting the right result in a transparently trustworthy way.
roystgnr
2mo ago
people claiming that the specific numbers were "Statistically impossible" because they violated some kind of theory
Do you mean me in particular?
I'm quite proud of that. The New York Times posted two data points from ongoing vote tallies, based on their direct access to the data. I said that those two couldn't be consistent with each other, based on nothing more than a priori mathematics. It turned out that I was right and the New York Times was wrong, because one of the updates in their data source was just a typo and a later update reverted it. The conspiracy theorists' explanation for the discrepancy was also wrong, but the final score in that particular round was still New York Times 0, Specific Numbers 0, Conspiracy Theorists 0, TheMotte Statistics 1.
roystgnr
3mo ago
The line that always stayed with me from this comic arc was "Instead, they'll just be stuck with her.", but "I hope you're listening to yourself." works here too.
Less patronizingly: How does "I want to explore kinky sex." cash out for you? If it really has to involve other partners then Syreen might not be able to help, but for anything other than that, "my best friend in the whole world", "intense and wonderful conversations", and especially "accepting of my quirks" sound like they describe a hell of a good place to start talking. People have their boundaries in different places, "a feather would be kinky but the whole chicken would just be perverted" as the old joke goes, but if the worst you expect is a "no" rather than an "ew, what is wrong with you" then you might as well find out hers.
roystgnr
3mo ago
There is video of him removing the barricades in preparation to trick people into going on the property.
And the internet found the connection where he had previously worked for the government as a snitch.
These statements deserve some hyperlinks.
I usually have fun trying to find reliable sources myself for ridiculous claims that might turn out to be true or might turn out to be interesting rabbit holes of bad epistemology, but I've got nothing to get a handle on here.
Searching for videos of Epps and barricades gets me to Epps at a barricade being breached, but (at least in the glimpses of him caught on shakycam) he's standing several feet back while others bring the barricade down, or even nudging one of the front-line people away from the barricade briefly, and the barricade is not removed to leave a deceptively open path, it's toppled to leave a climbable obstacle.
Searches for text about Epps being a government informant prior to Jan 6 naturally get me to a million articles about the theory that he was an informant or instigator on Jan 6.
roystgnr
3mo ago
I don't see how you can reasonably construe this speech as a problem.
I can see how "our land will not be balkanized" might be considered a problem for Somaliland residents, or "Our lands were taken from us before, and God willing, we may one day seek them" for some Kenyans and Ethiopians. Irredentism is all fun and games until a Putin or a Hamas get serious about it.
That still wouldn't excuse the mistranslating (assuming it was a mistranslation) of other parts of the speech to make them sound much more inflammatory than they were.
roystgnr
3mo ago
Sure seems like "abuse their users to make things better for their business customers" to me. Letting users share tweets via third parties without ads can reduce the reach of the ads!
as it desperately tries to become profitable
Worse than that, in Twitter's case. IMHO "profitable" would have been an achievable goal, but "profitable enough to pay for $13 billion in loans that'll need to get rolled over post-interest-rate-hikes" isn't going to happen.
roystgnr
3mo ago
It's very much a heavily libertarian pro-immigration argument; the modal pro-immigration activist is a left-winger who would be utterly horrified by it.
Even before the premises about welfare for illegal immigrants became dubious, the biggest sympathetic argument against Friedman was that this sort of "tiered system" was politically unsustainable in the US. Popular morality here includes a big mixture of Newtonian ethics and the Copenhagen Interpretation, so it doesn't matter how happy it makes utilitarians to see starving foreigners upgraded to much-less-impoverished guest workers, they'll be outnumbered by voters who see starving foreigners as someone else's tragedy but welfareless voteless guest workers as unconscionable apartheid.
The modal left-winger's main pro-illegal-immigration argument is much simpler: the immigrants will suffer much less in America than they do at home, and suffering is bad, so they should all get to come to America. It's a very compelling argument when you look at just the first-order effects, I have to admit. But there are a lot of both positive and negative second-order effects, and whether any of those make this idea unsustainable in some way is a more complicated question.
roystgnr
3mo ago
Not sure what you mean by "the second part". The "illegal immigration is good so long as it's illegal" theory was part of a public speech originally, and it does sometimes get quoted out loud still, approvingly. The "we now give illegal immigrants a myriad of benefits" caveat is a common anti-immigration complaint, but I don't know if I've ever seen it specifically pointed out as making Friedman's argument obsolete; it's just pointed out as a general cost of both legal and illegal immigration. The pro-immigration side of that branch of the argument is just attempts to rebut it. E.g. in-state university tuition rates for DACA recipients might make sense economically if you consider DACA-to-legal-citizenship as a fait accompli; if they're not going anywhere either way then in the long run you might get more state taxes out of them as college graduates, even looking at NPV minus tuition subsidies.
roystgnr
3mo ago
some pro-sanctuary arguments
"sanctuary" is a basket of many different policies. Perhaps the easiest to support is that police who are interacting with illegal immigrants who witness and report crimes should be prohibited from assisting with those immigrants' deportation, because otherwise the incentive is for the witnesses to just not report the crimes, and thereby still not get deported, making it harder to catch criminals before they reoffend (including against citizens and legal residents).
some pro-illegal immigration arguments in general
I've long been amused by Milton Friedman's argument:
"...that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as its illegal.
That's an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for social security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don’t qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They’re hard workers, they’re good workers, and they are clearly better off." - Milton Friedman, "What is America" lecture
Though bear in mind, this was the late 70s. Perhaps "do not qualify for ... benefits" was a reasonable blanket claim then, and crime wasn't even worth mentioning because who's going to risk deportation for stepping even slightly out of line? In the 2020s, when illegal immigrants can get free schooling (and then in-state university tuition rates, in dozens of states) for their kids, and sanctuary policies may explicitly prevent deporting many arrestees, the cost-benefit calculations may have more net losers.
roystgnr
3mo ago
It helps me to remember that "picked you up" is most importantly a metaphor, spanning generations. My parents once told me they'd been planning to remortgage their house if I had needed help with college tuition; later I found they'd barely touched their retirement savings, so they'll be picking up their grandkids' tuition instead.
I still get to carry one kid, thanks to a gym with a rock climbing obstacle that he's strong enough to complete but not tall enough to reach without a boost. Still keeping my eyes open for other cheats like that...
roystgnr
3mo ago
Apologies if you've seen all these already.
https://curiosityandcode.tumblr.com/post/145100433806/swanjolras-gosh-but-like-we-spent-hundreds-of
Do you count comics as memes? The best do spread virally. These three didn't really start hitting like hammers until I became a parent:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3106
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2996
And this one (in the original blog post form) took on more meaning after I read it to my daughter one night, as the only thing I could think of to assuage our despair at the discovery that my mother's minor health issue was actually incurable cancer.
roystgnr
3mo ago
Anyone who gets married 3x isn't a good husband
As an absolute statement this can't be right. The range of reasonable exceptions, from "the wife soon contracted a terminal disease" to "the wife turned out to be untrustworthy" is wide enough that there must be men who have had awful luck from it twice.
As a specific case, though, things like "the wife didn't get along with the mistress" or "the hooker turned out to be untrustworthy" are not in that range.
To the contrary, it's the models that aren't released that get the "careful not to imply that British royalty were white!" treatment. Release (with license to modify and republish, what is in this context inaccurately called "open source") your model weights and approximately nobody will prepend their prompts like that; try to fine-tune that behavior into the weights and your users will tune it right back out.
The public LLMs aren't as good as the state-of-the-art, but they're not awful, and this is the worst they'll ever be (in the capabilities sense, cross your fingers about real non-woke-definition safety...) from now on.
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