sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I believe Elon bought Twitter cause he saw the potential for Twitter to be a powerful center for civic discourse
I don't really think you can square the vision of Elon as particularly ideological (for free speech, technolibertarianism or whatever else) with a lot of the revealed policy decisions, and this includes actions and positions before the Twitter acquisition. At the end of the day, he's just not a particularly ideologically committed person. He'd like to be seen as such, and post-rationalises a lot of his decisions in that frame, but the underlying interests just seem like the usual, not-very-deep collection of personal and material.
This isn't a case of Elon setting a new policy, and then the policy being enforced. Elon's hitting the button himself after some personal slight or bad experience and then the policy is hastily written after the fact. See elonjet or the various journos getting knocked off (even taking spaces itself down). Before this, look at the breaking point for him on Covid policies (e.g. shutting down his factories), or with Trump's council of advisors, or his unwillingness to extend his supposed free speech principles to criticisms of China. Hell, he's now picking up the crusade against the independence of the federal reserve -- which he'll wrap in some principle or another but really comes down to the dire serviceability of the Twitter debt.
The main reason he initially bought Twitter wasn't altruistic, it was because the company was stagnant and overstaffed and had leadership that was largely content with that. For various reasons, Elon's succeeded in wringing significantly more productivity per dollar out of expensive tech talent in other domains. Now it turns out he's massively overpaid and is looking to offload shares at the original purchase price to various MENA autocrats.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
So far I've used it for:
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Lesson plans (mock trial of Odysseus)
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Supplying grant application filler
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Automate some accounting forensic tasks (what is this transaction)
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Poking around some quantum physics concepts for hard sci-fi worldbuilding
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'm in one such 'comparable' country, Australia, and voter ID is not mandatory (you don't need an ID to board a domestic flight either, which is nice).
One aspect in which the Australian political system is more unique, however, is the fact that everyone is obliged to vote in each federal, state, and local election. There are many benefits to this (overall it lowers the temperature and mitigates extremism while making mandates meaningful), but institutionally, one of the biggest is that the corrosive debate over who should be 'entitled' to vote does not exist. The vote should be sacralised to be beyond base, Machiavellian partisan machinations.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'm not sure what the import of what felons were historically able to do is -- historically most of any kind of person would not be able to vote, if anyone could vote at all.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
midterms, not presidential
sansampersamp
1yr ago
The recurring theme seems to be that it's a less than optimal way to counterbalance frictions in the voting process that don't exist in countries with more efficient elections. If there was much less on the ballot to vote on, and if polls could be provided with sufficient density on a weekend, the case for universal mail voting would be less likely to stack up.
Related to the point around 'dramatically increasing election funding' per @urquan below, a lot of what reduces the number of polling places on the margin, is the cost of hiring venues for each new location. Moving elections to the weekend makes it vastly easier to cheaply expand polling places, because you can use basically every public school at cost, which are already ideally distributed across the electorate.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
nouning
(ironically 'nouning' is an example of verbing)
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Once immigration from the subcontinent reaches a critical point, hopefully you'd start seeing cricket become the new sport du jour. Where the gentlemanly pace of the traditional formats might be offputting, the T20 format is more amphetemised than baseball.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
apologies for misreading your reddit post then
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I agree that it didn't come out of the blue on 2016, though I'd consider the view that it is largely a reaction to 2012 to be an agreement that it is actually quite recent.
For all the hay made of The Party Decides that became fodder for Getting It Wrong come 2016, to actually drop the conspiratorial lens on all the DNC leaks paints a picture of an astoundingly ineffectual institution.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
On what point? That 2016 was a significant inflection point or that centralised control under the dems were not also weak (but perhaps stronger than today). Your linked post largely agrees on the importance of 2016 (even if painting it as the apotheosis of an ongoing trend) and doesn't address symmetries or lack thereof.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'm not sure there was that much difference between them before 2016. The DNC is by no means a kingmaker either, and the experience with Sanders' campaigns has only served to weaken it further. Of course, both parties are astoundingly weak compared to peer countries'.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Just another reason why primaries are a bit of a mess. Strong party elites who can clear the field of detritus straightforwardly improve their party's chance of winning, but what little control the GOP once had over the process has evaporated post 2016.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
sansampersamp
1yr ago
While conviction certainly plays a part, it's not particularly confusing if you look at the geography. To turn Kherson into a grinding urban conflict like Mariupol would mean Ukrainian forces entering the city. This would mean Ukraine separating Kherson from the Antonivka Road Bridge that is the only point of supply or evacuation. Any notional preparations to fight a siege in Kherson would therefore only be relevant if Russians had reached the point where they had lost this key bridgehead. Any Russian forces staying in Kherson would be doing so with the knowledge that they would either die or be captured there, once Ukraine closed in.
The timing also makes sense. Given recent Ukrainian advances, there was only about 5km left until Ukraine could comfortably saturate the sole escape route with M777 or 155mm equivalents, after which withdrawal would become much more dicey.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
In this sense it’s in Russia’s interests to make Ukraine disperse their soldiers across the whole territory.
A withdrawal from Kherson would have the exact opposite effect, as falling back behind the natural boundary of the Dnieper will effectively shorten the front and enable both sides to redistribute any forces West of the Zaporizhzhia-Melitopol axis.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
This may have been the case a decade ago, but I'd be interested in anything showing that it still holds empirically with increasing polarisation on density and education, and decreasing polarisation on race.
Of course, I'd expect anyone cheerleading about voting for the sake of voting to benefit their own politics on average, because people cheerlead to their own social networks which usually are in political alignment with them.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I see 40% voter turnout for the 2018 midterms, which were a record high. I'm not sure what's projected for these ones.
We compel eligible people to vote here in Australia, and overall I'm a massive fan of it. Part of that is that politicking does not need to drive turnout itself, so ironically the half-panicked "please vote, please vote" stuff doesn't feature.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I was sympathetic to transhumanism prior to supporting transgender rights to self-modify, simply because of the order in which I encountered both ideas. A clean dividing line between the many ways our lives are technologically augmented and self-modification made little sense to me.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
For a long time, RP or mid-atlantic was the hegemonic "no accent" English for newscasts and politics. This accent is a contemporary RP, but with a mild Chinese accent on some words (e.g. foreign as for-eeyn).
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I think seeing someone do some enormously talented and exceptionally dumb things makes people try to collapse them down into someone whose stupid moves are all 4D chess maneuvers or whose smart moves are all dumb luck. The reality is probably just that someone can be very intelligent in some areas and inept in others.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I don't remember, was it you or someone else early into the war, there was a post with phrasing like «I'm sure Russians too have analytic centers with very smart people dedicated to planning this stuff, and we're seeing the result of one hyperintelligent network beating another, but it's a high-level play, full of feints and moves we cannot comprehend with our limited info».
I have a pretty good memory for that stuff, this is the comment you're thinking of. My reply downthread:
There's actually an idea in FP that essentially all wars are due to someone being very wrong in predicting how the war will go. If both sides know that an invasion would stall into a bloody mess, it won't happen. If both sides know that one side will confidently win, then they can extract concessions without fighting. It's only when one side is confident they will win with acceptable costs, and the other side knows they are wrong, when war happens.
Similarly: the worst hand in Poker isn't 27o -- it's KK when the guy across from you is holding AA. The former player just folds. Latter player loses his stack.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
And more flexible setbacks, and mixed-use, and less arduous parking minimums, etc etc. Even if you think the position is too minimal or cynical, the net result is certainly not an expansion of state power.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Single-family homes seems like a poor example compared to the other ones, since the main thrust of the pro-density activism is loosening control -- giving people more scope to do with their property what they wish
My Euro grand tour a few years back was 9 months, with the following itinerary (many stops to see friends or travel along with others for a small stretch):
Stops 1 through 11 were done over a couple of months in a group of five, who were on that tighter timeline. I think it works pretty well, and we did exclusively trains for that section.
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