sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
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User ID: 636
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
slow and exhausting to drive
This is basically a feature, people should be driving slow in neighborhoods.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
The fatal flaw of the American suburb for kids is the total lack of mobility. About a quarter of the drivers in my area drive trucks with lift kits that have enormous front blind spots. The roads don't have bike lanes and most are too busy to ride on the road. I live on a quiet street and kids play here sometimes with their parents supervising, but they have no ability to go anywhere outside the neighborhood and they can't even get to a park without crossing a five lane arterial and walking another mile through another neighborhood. The only thing they can do is wait until they turn 16 and get a license.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
There are some plans along those lines. Presumably you can't turn it into salt palaces because you're gonna run out of land to stack the salt.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
"I don't deny myself to women, Mandrake. But I do deny them my essence."
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Pastures and croplands account for two of the three biggest land usage categories. It's not clear what the marginal benefit of adding even more is.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
I don't know enough to steelman, but the usual concern is what you do with all the high salinity effluent. Opponents claim that dumping it in the ocean raises the salinity and kills marine life in the area.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Not run by people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Thiel-acolytes.
Yes, run by people like them too. Megalomania is not a trait in short supply among businessmen.
And let's not forget that Tesla is below NVidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta in market cap (and also has a tiny revenue compared to these companies).
Do you think those companies are also run like monarchies? Trust me, I can tell you from personal experience that they aren't.
On top of that, Jobs died 14 years ago and Apple has continued to prosper despite a decidedly non-monarchial government structure. Tim Cook is not running the company like Jobs did, not even close.
I won't even touch Trump because his firm makes just $600M in revenue which is way, way down the leaderboard of American companies (the 100th highest revenue company is fucking best buy at $43 billion with a B). I don't think any of the biggest companies are run by Thiel acolytes at all.
You're repeating a just-so story that explains one success without considering the other successes that work differently or the failures that work the same way. On top of that, you're under the impression that all companies run like this are the most successful in the country, which really isn't even close to true. Even Best Buy can out-earn one of your central examples of monarchical companies. Or should the country be run by Corie Barry?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
And who made a better product: Steve Job’s at Apple with his monarchical approach, or the bureaucratic IBM / BlackBerry / Xerox?
Regardless of the governance of a firm, firms are subject to market discipline both on the demand side (who buys their product?) and on the supply side (who is willing to work for them?) in a way that states are not. Pretending that Apple is successful because it was a monarchy is to completely miss the fact that there's a million bankrupt firms with the same governance structure. The fact is that Apple's success is made possible by the competitive, decidedly non-monarchial conditions of the market.
Yes, cities are blue, this is a fact.
Nevertheless, it's obviously false that presidential candidates are elected by the coastal elites or that candidates spend most of their energy on California and New York.
The majority of ad dollars and pandering do not go to convincing the coastal elites. The coastal elite vote is, as they say, priced in.
At best you can say that the coastal elite in California mean that the rest of the votes in the state don't matter. Of course, this is simply a popular vote, so it's a little strange to call them an elite when they apparently have the majority opinion in the state.
if you removed those few locked in states, the country is actually far redder than most people actually believe.
I agree, if you remove all the democrat voters the country would be red like you wouldn't believe.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Efforts to drive down Sub-Saharan African fertility cannot be conducted openly and for explicitly eugenic/racialist reasons.
They can be and are conducted openly. Yes, they don't openly do this because they think subsaharans are inferior, but that's because they don't and I don't see why that's a bad thing.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
The military presumably wastes money on slow rolling procurement and other things of that nature. A full quarter of defense spending is salaries, and perhaps there are people drawing a salary that don't need to be there.
SS is a cash transfer program that spends less than one percent on administrative overhead, so savings from firing useless employees would be minimal. The only possible avenue for waste would be actual fraud on the part of the recipients. I doubt that this is anywhere near 30%, but I don't expect either of us could convince the other on this point. However, the longer DOGE goes on without announcing finding this fraud, the more skeptical we should be.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Who is spending money on winning California or New York? Republicans haven't broken 40% in 20 years in California, and except for the last election, ny is the same.
In fact the classic criticism of the electoral college is that if you live in CA or NY then your vote doesn't matter. The ad spending bears this out. And this isn't a new trend - twenty years ago candidates were also focusing little on California and New York and way way more on Ohio.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
I don't see what that has to do with what I wrote.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
a study that will benefit a foreign drug company... quarter trillion dollar firms...
Which foreign company is benefiting from this?
Americans will have to pay eye watering prices while foreigners get it for free?
Americans can already get PrEP and it's even covered by Medicare and Medicaid, much to the chagrin of members of this forum who would rather people did not have HIV treatments.
Not to mention that other members of this forum were railing against USAID because they are "propping up" unsustainable populations of Africans. This trial was for a birth control device which would directly reduce the number of future Africans and yet I don't see those members defending this as a worthwhile expenditure. It makes me think that objections founded on population growth aren't really the crux of the objection.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
There are some indications that the amount of fraud in the larger programs such as SSI, Medicare/caid, and defense might be significant. If so, the savings could easily amount to $1 trillion per year. I guess we'll see.
SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense amount to amount to $3.5T. do you really believe that "easily" 30% of that is waste?
They've cut $100 billion so far.
Have they cut or have they just put a temporary stop on expenditures? How many programs have actually been durably cancelled, either by the executive or by Congress?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Reciprocal tariffs. We charge others what they charge us.
Except that others don't charge us tariffs, we charge ourselves tariffs. It's more like "we charge ourselves what others charge themselves". When you formulate it that way it becomes clear why this is a losing proposition.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Sloshing tariffs and corporate tax around is well and good, but what about the rest of the tax cuts promised, amounting to a fiscal hole somewhere in the neighborhood of $5T?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
Out of curiosity I asked deepthink about your situation and it also suggested electrolyte imbalance, although with about ten other things to investigate. Maybe that's a better medical advice LLM than Claude.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
10mo ago
You're right, I misremembered.
You'll probably be better off with non-alcoholic beer.
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