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token_progressive

maybe not the only progressive here

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joined 2022 October 25 17:28:07 UTC

				

User ID: 1737

token_progressive

maybe not the only progressive here

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 25 17:28:07 UTC

					

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User ID: 1737

Well, that explains Bruce Schneier's most recent blog post "Improving C++". I'm generally a fan of Rust, but acknowledge there's a lot of existing code in C/C++ and rewriting code that works is asking for trouble; we should be making sure we have the tooling to retrofit the appropriate checks into existing code. That is, updating to C++29 or whatever is almost certainly going to be easier and less error-prone than porting to Rust.


Tivoization is the term for the problem you're talking about. And free software advocates have been raging against it since, uh, you could actually find someone who could remember the last time they saw a TiVo. With the recent EU fight with Apple and the Right to Repair movement in the US, it looks like there's a small push in the other direction at the moment. But that's not very reassuring.

It is weird to see an anti-government anti-Tivoization rant given that I've always seen it as an anti-corporate position.

Presidential primaries are not just about who wins the nomination and general election. They're also about policy. While it's obfuscated, the primary selects actual people to attend the nominating convention which both selects the candidate and negotiates exactly what appears on the party platform.

I doubt most of the pro-Gaza agitators honestly think they are going get Biden off the ballot, but they might think they can put enough pressure on him and the Democratic Party to change their official position on Gaza. They're probably wrong, but I'm sure there's people inside Biden's campaign watching this and considering what threshold of protest votes would make them consider what changes in policy. I suspect that threshold is much higher than we're seeing, but I'm really not sure.

Eliminating the people in charge of keeping China honest on containing pandemics only a few months before China proceeds to not even try to contain a pandemic and blatantly lie about it seems like it might be a little related. Sure, they may have failed to contain it if they did try.

To be fair, the more important line of defense would have been keeping China honest on enforcing the rules about live animal markets they implemented after SARS and then stopped enforcing after a few years; I'm having trouble finding a hard timeline on that, but that's definitely primarily Obama's fuck up.

The FAQ page includes the chart you asked for (up to December 2020), which shows there was a pretty big jump in early 2020, but nowhere near as large as it looks on the official chart (i.e. around 2x instead of around 10x).

This is where the narrator voiceover comes in to correct me that 2020 was not in fact a fairly normal year lacking in chaos or bad things for Americans.

I'm really not sure how we got the narrative that the liberals were crying wolf over the bad things Trump was doing, and then an actual catastrophe happened as a result, and somehow you still think they were crying wolf?

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Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids.

I don't think this really changes your point, but "all the gay people" is definitely an exaggeration here. I definitely know people whose queerness is central to their counter-culture identity of "down with heteronormative patriarchal capitalism" or whatever, including speaking out against nuclear families. And queer artists who joyfully include the same themes in their work.

I don't understand how this is possibly the court's fault. I haven't heard of this challenge before, so maybe the article you linked about it is misleading somehow, but it sounds like the sequence of events was:

  1. Lindell proposes a challenge claiming he has evidence related to cheating on the 2020 election, offers a $5 million prize to the first person to prove him wrong to the satisfaction of him or an arbitrator he chose.
  2. Someone in fact convinces the arbitrator they have fulfilled the requirements of the prize; Lindell doesn't pay out.
  3. Just now, a court confirmed that, yes, the arbitrator really was convinced and that means Lindell has to pay out.

The court very explicitly did not look at the election claims; they only said "this was the terms of the bet; they were fulfilled, so you have to pay out".


It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.

I'm really not sure why you think evidence of election interference isn't investigated by government authorities (reworded because I'm not sure if law enforcement or the secretary of state's office / election board is the appropriate authority, probably depends on the exact case). It sounds like Lindell didn't have any evidence and just threw together some unrelated obfuscated numbers and didn't expect anyone to call him out on it.

Sorry, being sick sucks. Having to work while sick really sucks. I definitely see people blame forcing people to work while sick on US-specific idiocy so it's interesting to hear the same from another country.

I thought doing flu/RSV PCR along with any COVID PCR was standard? Maybe just in the US?

I guess he hasn't mentioned it in a bit, but for a while Daniel Griffin in the TWiV clinical updates was harping on the fact that COVID+flu happened enough and had a sufficiently different treatment plan that flu tests should always be done for COVID patients (I'm guessing he meant hospitalized ones?).

The question of who is the aggressor in the culture war comes up here every once in a while. As every other reply seems to be certain that the Blue Tribe is the aggressor against the Red Tribe, I feel like I should point out that the Blue Tribe believes the opposite. From the Blue Tribe point of view, they want equality and rights for everyone regardless of identity, and they believe that's the default if only the Red Tribe would stop discriminating.

It certainly wasn't that bad pre-2020, but probably a large part of why it got so bad is that Seattle's downtown has never been a place normal people went very often. Away from the touristy waterfront (which doesn't have many tourists in the winter, hence your lack of wait at the "original Starbucks" which I assure you was quite packed this past summer), it's pretty much just office buildings. Outside of 8-6 on weekdays, pre-2020, it was completely empty other than where the public transit transfers are. You could go blocks without seeing another human, even in the summer at mid-day. A lot of restaurants didn't bother opening for dinner or on weekends because they were only for office workers, and the nearby nightlife neighborhoods (Belltown and Capitol Hill) are not that far a walk (or short transit ride).

A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record.

[...]

I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID.

Trying to put some actual numbers to this:

According to the NYT COVID data page, weekly COVID deaths in the past year have ranged from 490 (July 2-8) to 2,462 (Jan 7-13) or 0.9%-3.6% of all deaths. Of course, this is deaths from acute COVID, actual COVID deaths is somewhat higher than the official numbers, but hard to get good data on how much higher, so let's stick to these numbers. Also, going back further the numbers are a lot higher and less regular, I'm assuming the past year is a much better approximation of what to expect going forward than including any older data. (Also, I'm not seeing an official 2023 death count... looking I found this 2022 report published in May 2023 so it's probably just too early for finalized 2023 numbers.)

112k/52 = average 2,153 deaths/week from overdose deaths, doesn't seem hugely different from number of COVID deaths, although since overdose doses are mostly young and COVID deaths are mostly old, measuring in QALYs would likely paint a different picture... although if you're measuring QALYs, not trying to measure the impact of post-COVID conditions seems unfair, and I'm not sure how that would affect the conclusion.

There's also the obvious issue that COVID is practically unavoidable, although there's ways to reduce the impact (vaccination, antivirals, not getting old being healthier), while avoiding an overdose is straight forward: Don't Do Drugs(tm). Or, at least, that's the oversimplification in the popular conception of the two.

Opioids definitely do affect different people differently. I've had them prescribed once to take after a surgery. I took one dose immediately after the surgery and decided I'd rather no pain medication at all than a second dose. (Pretty sure I took ibuprofen, not nothing.) I've discussed this with others and gather this isn't an entirely uncommon reaction, although certainly far from a majority opinion.

(1) would require cooperation from the people running the election. But (2) and (3) do not as they only involve looking at publicly available information (depending on state may require an explicit request, but in many states you can simply go to the Secretary of State's website and click download). Why haven't the groups claiming election fraud done them? Or maybe they have?

I'm not giving a "should". Maybe Hlynka is, but there's certainly multiple options how you deal with people not recognizing the legitimacy of a government. Simply ignoring them is the default, and works just fine if there aren't too many of them or they aren't particularly interested in taking action. On the other extreme is civil war. I think the US is leaning a lot closer to the former than the latter.

I think you two might be talking past each other. Whether or not the losers should have good objections is a normative statement. Whether or not their objections are a problem is a descriptive statement. If the losers refuse to accept the result of an election no matter how fair and transparent it is, you don't have a functioning democracy.

So one side gets a Heckler's Veto until they are convinced of the legitimacy of the election?

This, but unironically.

The primary goal of an election is convincing the losers they lost to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Selecting a winner is a significantly less important goal. If a large portion of the population doesn't believe the election (and therefore the government) is legitimate, that's the road to a coup or civil war. Or at least lower level societal dysfunction as more people reject government authority. It's still a problem even if their reasons appear to be nonsense.

My understanding is that E-verify isn't changing any law; it's simply an enforcement mechanism for existing laws. While not enforcing a bad law may be better than enforcing it... it's still a bad situation. For employment of undocumented workers, the legal grey area means they get underpaid and poor work conditions because they don't have the legal recourse of reporting their employer for abuses. I think pushing for E-verify is about trying to corner the anti-immigration politicians into defining some official concept of a work visa so we don't have the current nonsense of de-facto work visas without labor laws. The actual result seems to be a complete lack of action on immigration because a compromise can't be reached but no one likes the status quo either.

This feels to me like he's going for embodying the "No, it's the children who are wrong." meme. Millennials (who aren't remotely "children" anymore but make up the plurality of Swift's fans) and younger are mostly wondering what is wrong with Republicans constantly going on about the existence of hair dye and queer people; those are normal to most of those age groups. And just maybe it's a hard sell to women looking to date men and/or intentionally have children to vote for the party who has state officials making national news for actively trying to prevent women from getting medical care to prevent infertility due to pregnancy complications; that seems a lot more likely to be popular with older women who can feel ideologically pure about opposing abortion without being worried about it affecting themselves directly.

Comically, this is almost exactly a common argument I see in favor of open borders: that is, that we already have "open borders" for capital and it causes exactly those problems so it's BS that we don't have open borders for labor, too.

Not claiming it's a good argument, but I've definitely seen it pretty often.

Yeah, there's a reason "electoral reform" followed closely by "legislative reform" are at the top of that list and others like it. As far as I can see, the available levers to actually effect political change of this kind (i.e. movement on an issue other than what appears in the major party platform) are:

  1. Voting in primaries if there's some candidates running with oddball positions you might be able to push a major party towards. (State legislature is probably the appropriate level to target.)
  2. Running in primaries.
  3. Citizen lobbying groups. I don't like IRV but at least it's not FPTP and FairVote does seem to be making some real, albeit slow, progress in getting it adopted in various places in the US. That said, I'm not sure that generalizes as there's no real anti-FairVote interest group. The opposition is mainly inertia and not wanting to spend more money (and, cynically, elected officials not wanting changes to the system that got them elected, but at least they aren't going to say that). Basically every other issue on that list has an effective lobbying group willing and able to fight against changes.

Apparently, voting for a third party in a presidential election doesn't make the list. Sure, make your protest votes if you want, but as you say, the major parties will just ignore them unless they got a lot of the vote.

(or at least for their children to)

I thought second-generation immigrants nearly universally spoke English natively, with the possible exception of some insular religious communities like the Amish. Are there notable exceptions that I'm missing?

traditionally sympathetic media outlets

CNN had some ownership/leadership changes in 2022 which included an explicitly stated goal of being more neutral. Whether they're a right-wing media outlet now depends on who you ask, but they're actively trying to shed their image as a pro-Democratic-Party one.

They're not creating vaccines for real viruses killing in real time, they're conjuring up new threats.

Those threats exist, they just haven't reached the human population yet. It sounds like your position is that surveillance for pandemic-potential viruses shouldn't be done as you believe it's not worth the risk, and we should instead wait for the spillover to happen before studying a virus? Does this include not studying known pandemic-potential viruses like H5N1? Who defines what counts as a distinct virus (the link you gave talks about "SARS-related CoVs" after all, and was posted well after the SARS spillover)? Actually, until you've collected and analyzed the viruses, how do you even know if there's novel ones in your sample; should we stop collecting viruses from non-humans all-together? What about research on viruses affecting agriculture (see H5N1)? Or maybe I'm drawing the line at the wrong place and you think no research should be done with humanized animal models, in which case I don't know how you're going to develop any vaccines.

My understanding of the problem with banning "gain of function" research is that the term is that any research on real viruses* is either (1) intentional bio-weapons research which we already have policies around (which generally read "Don't.") or (2) something that could reasonably be called "gain of function" because you can't do anything with viruses without allowing them to propagate and therefore evolve. And for (2) we already have rules about what experiments require what level BSL. Scientists tend to not approve of the proposal of "don't study real viruses".

*As opposed to pseudovirus models of some kind where you've ripped out most of the virus so you're pretty sure it's not dangerous. But, oh, yeah, to do that, you've changed the function of the virus. Has it gained function? Who's defining "gain" here? Truly not trying to play semantics games here: if only some experiments are "gain" of function, what's your process for deciding which ones those are? What happens if they're wrong? How is this any different from the current system?

I'm not even sure what you (and whoever "several of us" is?) are accusing me of.

I've been posting here since the /r/SSC days (mods here theoretically know what username I was using back then) without ever drawing the attention of the mods and try to keep to citable facts / widely held (within the left) opinions.