sulla
8mo ago
- Yes
- No, rolling stop is fine in many cases for stop signs or right turn on red
- No, a large truck and a sports car do not have the same safe operating speed
- No, when there is traffic all lanes should be utilized.
- Not if it’s a safety hazard
- No
- Yes?
sulla
8mo ago
In my opinion this was a disasterclass by Musk and extremely embarrassing for him. He didn’t like the bill… fine. But to completely burn the bridge with Trump after already burning the bridge with all Democrats? Unhinged behavior.
When king/arch-merchant alliances turn sour, the king always wins and the arch-merchant ends up dead or bankrupt. I would have expected Kekius Maximus to remember his Roman history better.
sulla
8mo ago
Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market.
He can’t even into Bayes. There are many thousands of raccoon-dog stalls in China. There was exactly one BSL-3 lab in China. There was exactly one lab studying GoF on human coronaviruses.
sulla
9mo ago
I agree that it is fundamentally just a lazy attempt to apply a negative label to people the users of the term don’t like. It’s like “the left are the real racists.” It’s supposed to be a “gotcha” but it doesn’t really work in practice.
sulla
9mo ago
The problem is Russia feels like it can simply win outright, at this point. Therefore, to achieve a peace that reflects the current EV of the war, Ukraine has to accept a deal that is worse than the current status quo. They will never do this, so the most likely outcome is a complete victory for Russia.
sulla
9mo ago
Eliezer disappeared at the height of his power and influence. He could have been much more impactful on AGI development but he was too tired from writing a fanfic and being a micro-celebrity. He relegated himself to side-character territory at best.
sulla
10mo ago
“The purposes of some systems is what they do” there I fixed it. The slogan is usually used to imply that the nominal purpose of a given system differs from the true intentions of those who design or perpetuate the system. This obviously happens sometimes.
To his point, while it is often a worthwhile hypothesis or heuristic, it is not a self-proving statement. You can’t prove a system is corrupt by design just by observing that it is corrupt.
sulla
10mo ago
I’ve noticed a similar effect among boomer conservatives. Many feel somewhat left behind by the Trump administration. As Trump shows that you can “just do things,” their decades of being “beautiful losers” looks more and more like cowardice and less like principle. Losing is deeply rooting in their identity.
They have a hard time letting go of the idea that the best you can do is ride on top of the train yelling “slow down!” You don’t have to let the liberals drive - you can actually go in any direction that you want.
There is also an aspect that they genuinely believed the post-war consensus/“boomer truth regime.” Now that the right is definitively away from this and winning, they… still believe what they always believed. The fact that they believe this things because they were manipulated and coerced into believing them does not make it easier to change their view.
The Republican Party now belongs to the youth who “get it,” not the boomers who don’t. This is the problem that the Democrats have. Their boomer ideology is in the way out and their youth ideology is an unserious version of communism. They seemingly have no good plays available.
sulla
11mo ago
Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was
I understand that this line was not core to your point, but to correct the record - Musk’s family was middle class, turbulent, and abusive. His father’s financial success was very up and down, and he is now completely broke (Musk used to support him, but cut him off after he repeated slept with and attempted to sleep with younger family members.)
Musk arrived in Canada at 17 with $2000 to his name and never received substantial financial support from his family after that. His mom would sometimes send him $100 for groceries. There is no evidence that he ever received a large cash infusion from his parents. Of all the excuses for why Musk is more successful than you, “rich parents” has to be the worst.
sulla
11mo ago
Trump’s plan:
- Invoke insurrection act to send troops to the souther border
- Secure the southern border
- ?????
- Hitler: Orange Edition
As usual these fears don’t make any sense. This is not Rome, invoking the Insurrection Act does not confer Trump the title of Dictator. It wouldn’t expand his power beyond the southern border.
sulla
11mo ago
Out of context though. This was supposed to be a friendly press conference, with negotiations to take place in private, but Zelenskyy tried to leverage it as an opportunity to negotiate and lecture Trump and Vance. After 40-ish minutes Vance lost patience with Zelenskyy’s stunt.
I think Trump would have handled it better alone but Zelenskyy sabotaging the press conference was a massive diplomatic mistake.
sulla
11mo ago
The 10 minutes at the end were not the whole meeting. It was 50 minutes of “Putin is a terrorist” and “no concessions to a killer” from Zelenskyy. Trump and Vance’s frustration boiled over in the end, even if it seemed unprovoked in the shortened clip.
I felt after the Lex interview that Ukraine will become part of Russia. Zelenskyy is completely blinded by his hate for Russia and Putin and his desire for revenge, to the point that he cannot accept the reality of Ukraine’s losing position.
Ukraine’s only hope is that Trump is able to break Zelenskyy. Trump claims that Zelenskyy is already begging to be let back in. But I’m not sure it’s possible: Zelenskyy may be too courageous/stupid, which will spell the end of Ukraine.
sulla
11mo ago
Sure, but the Impoundment Act is pretty clearly written and very likely constitutional. It's not a regulation or a norm or a gentlemen's agreement.
The truth is, nobody knows if it’s constitutional. It’s something we’ve agreed not talk to about for the past 50 years. We may get the opportunity to find out.
sulla
11mo ago
In Ben Franklin's 1729 pamphlet A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, he observed that true wealth consists of the ability to command labor. This framing positions wealth as almost inherently a positional good. While it is not true exactly, it is true that currently 100 inch flat screen TVs, infinite food, and dishwashers can't replace the benefits of human laborers to do your building. And clearly, it is impossible for everyone to pay others to do more labor in aggregate than they themselves are doing, as the demand would be eternally greater than the supply.
Humanoid robots have the potential to break this bottleneck for the first time in history. The true promise of industrial society - to eliminate the positional nature of wealth - will become a possibility. It will happen gradually, then all-at once. But above all, it is happening soon and 99% of people are not mentally prepared, or are in denial.
Well sometimes in traffic the left lane moves slower than the other lanes, even when there is no jam and the cars are just tightly packed.
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