ulyssessword
No bio...
User ID: 308
ulyssessword
4mo ago
Science has its flaws, but it’s still the secret sauce of western societies’ success and a key part of the economic engine.
One of its flaws is political activism that shatters any semblance of neutrality or objectivity. See here for an earlier discussion of a scientific institution taking on a political cause (Nature endorsing Biden).
Your spokespeople and champions are anti-Trump, and you get tarred with the same brush.
Good luck A) fixing the reputation of science-in-general (preferably by fixing the actual problems instead of by spreading effective propaganda), or B) distancing your field from science-in-general (as Computer Science has already done). I don't see a third option.
ulyssessword
11mo ago
There's a problem with this inability to recognize evil as evil that is endemic here.
A felony is a kind of serious crime.
A felony is words on a page. I don't let the Word of God bypass my moral reasoning (I'm not a very good Catholic), and I definitely won't let the US Criminal Code bypass it either.
Let me turn the question back on you: If/when Trump successfully appeals that verdict, will your moral judgment change? He literally would not be a felon, and you are placing a lot of importance on that. Assuming that his felony-free status wouldn't change your mind, why would you think that his felony-convicted status would change anyone else's?
For a lighter story about how the law can be misaligned with morality, see this article:
And even though it might be the morally right thing to do, Der said breaking into a car is still considered property damage, which is a criminal offence — even if the person's intention is to save a pet.
There's a certain debate strategy that gets on my nerves. I'm sure there's a formal term for it, but I call it a "prohibition on reason".
I see it here, with "felon = evil". I saw it during the pandemic, where public health measures were treated the same as risk factors ("The virus knows if you're sitting or standing, so it's only safe to sit unmasked in a restaurant"). I saw it in cancellation campaigns where an activist NGO is treated as infallible ("The 'okay' handsign is a white supremacist dogwhistle. The trucker should be fired.")
ulyssessword
8mo ago
Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?
One (unfortunately) underappreciated way to build trust is to be trustworthy.
At least some of the claims about fraud are at least superficially plausible, so any plan that doesn't acknowledge and fix that is just more effective deception.
ulyssessword
8mo ago
Notice anything?
I noticed that you listed accounts like that. I have no idea what the base rates are.
By the Chinese Robber fallacy, you could have literally a million examples of something and still have no point (more like hundreds for Twitter pay, given the population size).
I respect random Motters more than journalists, but still not enough to take you at your word here.
ulyssessword
4mo ago
We have gotten to an odd place where people can nonchalantly talk about fighting police weekly and utilizing millions of dollars of public resources as "rights".
Get on our level. British Columbia got into a bit of a kerfuffle when it tried to ban people from injecting drugs in playgrounds. Apparently it would cause "irreparable harm" if they had to shoot up elsewhere, so the BC Supreme Court filed an injunction against that amendment.
(They eventually got it banned, eight months after their first attempt. Having Health Canada do it instead of the BC government was the secret sauce to make it stick, because it matters which government is violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or something.)
ulyssessword
6mo ago
For the unfamiliar, it's a temporary suspension of the Federal sales tax on this subset of items.
It came into effect three weeks after the initial announcement, and will end two months later. Retailers are responsible for categorizing children's LEGO (intended for those under 14) separately from adult LEGO (intended for those 14+) because only the first is tax-exempt. Or they could choose not to participate, in which case they would collect and remit the tax, and the customer could file to have the GST they paid on exempt items refunded (like anyone is going to do that).
It's a horrible amount of effort and confusion for a tiny amount of tax cuts.
ulyssessword
3mo ago
I don't think "fake it 'til you make it" is a very good basis for a legal system. Continuously breaking the law for years is worse than breaking it for days, all else being equal.
ulyssessword
10mo ago
If you weren't talking as a mod, then it's a low-content comment. That's what the downvote button is for.
ulyssessword
11mo ago
Yeah, sometimes security really is that bad.
For a less serious example, "somebody" walked into the phone store, asked for a replacement SIM for my account (providing the phone number and possibly my name, but no other information), and walked out a few minutes later with the old SIM deactivated and the new card in their possession. That person was me, but they had no way of knowing that because they never asked or checked.
I think elections should at least be protected against that level of fraud.
ulyssessword
11mo ago
Kamala Harris's insane questioning of Brett Kavanaugh
Wow that's a bad clip. For those without 8:00 to spare, the summary is:
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Harris: Have you discussed Bob Mueller and his investigation with anyone?
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Kavanaugh: Yes, with fellow judges.
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H: Have you discussed Bob Mueller and his investigation with anyone at [this specific law firm]?
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K: I don't remember, but if you have something you want...
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H: Are you certain you haven't?
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K: Is there a person you're talking about?
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H: It's a very direct question. [repeats it]
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Committee Member(?): Objection, you can't expect him to know everyone who works at a specific law firm.
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Harris: Have you ever discussed Bob Mueller or his investigation with anyone?
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K: Of course, he was a coworker.
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H: Have you discussed Bob Mueller or his investigation with anyone at [this specific law firm]?
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K: I need to know who works there.
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H: I don't think you do. You can answer it without a roster of the employees.
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K: No, I can't, particularly when you switched from "and" to "or" after the objection.
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H: Have you discussed Bob Mueller and his investigation with anyone at [this specific law firm]?
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K: I don't remember.
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H: So you're denying it? I'll move on, clearly you won't answer the question.
If anything, I'm being charitable to Harris. I cut out a bunch of repetitions, insinuations, and opportunities to clarify. (I also cut out some misconduct from the crowd and quibbling by one of her allies(?) because that's not her fault.)
ulyssessword
10mo ago
Or here's a billion dollar idea, just turn on a goddamn windows machine locally with your patch before sending it out. This patch broke ~100% of windows machines it came across, so you just needed to have done 1 manual patch of 1 fucking machine locally to have discovered this bug.
That brought it home for me. Our IT department (a total of three people, one of whom never touches these projects) created a bug in their software and only caught it on the "trial" rollout. That caution might have saved nearly a dozen man-hours of workers waiting for them to revert the changes.
If we can get that right in a small company that barely touches software, how could a multibillion-dollar corporation that focused on security fail?
ulyssessword
6mo ago
So in order to justify the cost of these officers they are going to need to ticket between 470k and 970k people.
Wait, you were being literal when you asked about the Return on Investment? I'm sure that the 11 Insanely Corrupt Speed-Trap Towns have great ROI figures for their police forces.
The "return" for proper policework is non-financial.
ulyssessword
7mo ago
As a side note, I remember the onion being much more relevant sometime in the past. I wonder if its decline is related to it becoming just another mouthpiece for the democrat agenda, or if I'm totally off track.
Babylon Bee feels grounded in a way that the Onion isn't. Practically all of their articles start with an actual piece of news: The CEO of Polymarket was raided, Matt Gaetz was appointed, Cabinet picks were protested, etc.
The Onion relies more on completely-fabricated articles (1, 2, 3) which simply don't have the same impact. The ones that do contain factual content are unbearably blunt at promoting the establishment (or farther left) stance on the issue.
Relatedly, I couldn't find a single Onion article against the Left, while Babylon Bee articles against the Right are a dime a dozen. That type of hardline political stance turns me off, and I suspect it does the same for others.
ulyssessword
8mo ago
Prediction: "Generation Z" and "Zoomer" will be given a false entomology of "person who used Zoom to attend school during the COVID 19 pandemic" within the next couple decades.
ulyssessword
6mo ago
Space is a black void with a few resources we can mostly find on earth. It can never replace the Wild West, the frontier. It is empty, and it can never be home to us. This is where we have evolved to live, and to die.
The Earth vs. Moon and African Plains vs. far Arctic are differences of degree, not kind. Both the moon and the arctic are inhospitable environments that will quickly kill unprotected humans, and lack easy access to essential resources. And yet, with sufficient adaptation and technology, we've managed to create self-sufficient populations in the far north.
We've gone beyond "where we have evolved to live, and to die" once already. I wouldn't count us out yet.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Union leadership also limits membership to secure jobs for their members.
If the local union has 500 members and each can do 0.2 houses per year (e.g. a crew of 10 can do two houses per year), then I guess your city is building a max of 100 houses. What if you want more than 100 houses built? Too bad, union labor is mandated, and they're not interested in de-monopilizing the sector.
Those 500 workers will sure be happy that they're in so much demand. The union did its job.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
The proper way to do things is first reach the moral high ground, then attack your opponents for not being there. They skipped a step.
If the Right has to own up to this (at this point only alleged) failure, what does the Left have to own up to (or better yet: What has the Left already owned up to, to serve as an example)? The closest Scott gets to answering that question is through a link that contains a link that links to resources for thinking critically about Social Justice. I assume that there are object-level criticisms in the resources listed there, but I haven't actually checked.
ulyssessword
10mo ago
A missing mood in development news: Environmentalists pin hopes on tiny fish to stop Highway 413.
From a plain reading of the article, the logic goes:
- Activists don't like the proposed Highway 413
- They searched for a way to stop it.
- They found these fish, and the strategy may be effective.
In a sane world filled with people arguing in good faith, you might see a similar situation:
- There are endangered animals in an area
- Environmentalists discovered development posed a risk to them
- Therefore they oppose that development
If you trust the CBC's reporting, then the activists would be better described as anti-development rather than environmentalist. The discussion is centered on the highway, the political situation around it, the promises that Doug Ford (bad!) made, and the actions the Federal Liberals (good!) took which slowed it down.
ulyssessword
7mo ago
relative to her demographic cohort the reaction towards Trump and his supporters is unbelievably tame. It is somewhere around 3/10 on the TDS scale. So I don't think that apology is even warranted. Every reasonable person knows that emotions will be high for a while.
I'm not grading on a curve. If you say that's a 3/10, then I say apologies start being appropriate at a 2/10. You don't get any credit for even worse people existing.
Yes, emotions will be high, but that just means that you have to deal with it like an adult or apologize for your failure to do so.
ulyssessword
11mo ago
Right wing cancel culture is a thing-
Not much of one. If you added up the top 10 people cancelled by the Right, do you think they would reach the prominence of James Damore? Google Trends could quantify it if you want to check.
remember when homosexuality could get you canceled?
No, I literally don't. Jack Black probably does given his age, but homosexuality has been (at least) tolerable for as long as I've been politically aware (though that could be a Canadian vs. American difference).
ulyssessword
5mo ago
Consistent, static user interfaces are so last year. Modern UX design is all about placing the most-used options in the most-accessible places so that new users can find them as quickly as possible.
With that in mind, I'd like to recommend a plugin to anyone who likes creating dynamic user interfaces in that style: Markov Keyboard is a revolution in UI design, placing your most-used letters in the most-accessible locations on your keyboard. Instead of just doing this once (as in a Dvorak layout) it remaps the keys after each keystroke, maximizing the benefit.
(ask me about my latest experiences with Windows 11. Or don't. I'm sure you can guess.)
ulyssessword
4mo ago
it will not be surprising that a) existing academics shift away from you
Why would anyone think that's surprising? I suppose a few people might believe that professional ethics and impartiality beats human nature and relationships, but I can't see that being a very common view.
I think it's bad that those supposedly-neutral institutions have taken up partisanship.
c) a feedback loop emerges where conservatives and academics increasingly view each other with hostility because the former (largely correctly) believe the latter don't share their values...
You think it's thoughts that the conservatives are opposed to? What happened to "parasitic and quite possibly degenerate" from earlier in the paragraph?
...and the latter (largely correctly) believe the former want to destroy them.
Where are the bulldozers? As far as I can tell, American conservative goals stop at tightening the public purse strings. If private donors want to fund it they can go right ahead.
ulyssessword
8mo ago
Don't laugh, it's already happening in other countries.
I'm not laughing, because it's happening here in Canada.
The federal government banned free news posts on large websites (literally just Facebook and Google). Facebook decided it didn't want to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to host paid links, so it chose to not be a Digital News Intermediary under the new regime and was therefore required to block all news links. Google negotiated an exemption for itself in exchange for $100M/yr paid to the Canadian Journalism Collective, so there are literally zero companies covered by the Online News Act.
The end result? News as a whole is worse in Canada, with smaller outlets (particularly ones that won't get funding from the CJC) hit the hardest.
They had the gall to complain about Facebook harming Canadian journalism by "not paying their fair share" and "unfairly profiting". Now that Facebook is drawing zero profit and their fair share is consequently zero, the journalists are still complaining about how harmful the ban has been. Of course, they blame Facebook for following the regulations rather than the Federal government for creating them.
Ideally, journalists would even receive state funding to spread regime propaganda more directly, removing the need for subscribers at all.
Yup: "(8)...the groups wants 70% of news costs paid for government or through government regulation." If that had actually occurred, then Canadian journalists would barely have had to provide anything, nevermind anything of real value.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
I think free range is good for kids simply because it allows for kids to grow into adulthood.
A quote that stuck with me: "You aren't raising a child, you're raising an adult who happens to be a child right now."
Some people have learned very well how to be children, and have 20+ years of experience in that role. Others have already gained experience with adulthood before they get legal recognition at 18, and are already (somewhat) prepared for the challenges they will be facing.
My thoughts throughout this Presidency (all three weeks of it) has been a mix of:
Damn, Trump is reckless, unprofessional, and vain.
How the fuck does he have so much ammo?
There's a plane crash? Air Traffic Controllers were hired under a racist system. Foreign aid? Transgender operas in Colombia. Funding basic science? >60% "administrative overhead" tacked on. Threaten Canada with tariffs? Suddenly our border security is a valid issue. Random whatever? $20M in subscriptions to the Associated Press, and another $1.6M to the NYT.
It feels like a weird mirror to the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy: He gives every indication of shooting blindly, but there has actually been a bullseye where he hits all along. That could be luck or good spin, but the most compelling story is that everywhere is that bad.
(Related joke: There has been a shooting at a peaceful protest! A child molester, a sexual assaulter, and a convicted felon illegally carrying a gun are the only people injured.)
I still don't think he's doing a good job, but damn does he have a strong narrative.
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