wlxd
2yr ago
shrinking populations are bad, but producing vastly more welfare recipients is perhaps even worse
Shrinking population produce a lot of welfare recipients. These are typically called “retirees”. Unlike the young welfare recipients, the retirees cannot be made to work very effectively.
wlxd
4mo ago
Do you know for a fact that new GPT models include native voice modality, versus some sort of Whisper preprocessing stage? I’m asking, because a couple of days ago I was trying to explain to /u/jkf that this is most definitely within the potential range of capabilities of frontier models, with him being skeptical.
wlxd
4mo ago
That’s still expensive and risky. Sham marriage would be immigration fraud, a crime. This means that you need to compensate your co-conspirators generously to go along with it, because it requires a lot of effort and legal risk, and binds them to you for years. Ultimately, the investment visa might be cheaper in practice when you adjust for risk.
wlxd
1yr ago
What kind of negative effects does the excess of women produce? Excess of men is thought to cause violence and unrest, but this mechanism doesn’t work with women, because they are not nearly as aggressive as men are.
wlxd
2yr ago
I have lived in Seattle metro for a couple of years, and I am yet to encounter a location within it which is more than 15 minutes bicycle ride from a normal grocery store. I just tried to find one using Google Maps, and only places I can find are at the very edges of farthest exurbs.
My experience with suburbs is exactly the same as /u/TIRM . Ability to form social relationship with your neighbors, and for your kids to play outside with other kids is one of the things that’s attracting people to suburbs, not repelling them!
wlxd
2yr ago
I am thinking about moving to Alaska. I do lots of outdoors stuff, and given how much wildlife there is in Alaska, safety from it, bears in particular, is a concern much larger than it is for me in lower 48.
Here is the question: do firearms offer higher degree of safety from bears than just bear spray in practice? If yes, which firearms would be an appropriate balance of effectiveness and practicality (size, weight, operational concerns etc)?
The new arrivals are, indeed, refugees, but even before the war, Poland was actually swamped by “temporary” workers from Ukraine. But that’s not the point: the difference between Ukrainians in Poland vs Africans in Germany or Sweden is not so much based on legal status, but rather cultural similarity. If US today got mass immigration from English Canadians, who just happened to speak as incomprehensibly as rural Scottsmen, but quickly learn local dialect, it wouldn’t be seen as that big of a deal, compared to mass immigration from Latin America. This is closer to the today’s relationship between Poles and Ukrainians, despite recent history of genocide of Poles perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists (unlike with Blacks in US, in Europe grudges are not so persistently held, especially if they happen to become very inconvenient due to changing political realities).
wlxd
2mo ago
The problem is not with the withholding order. The problem is that apparently everyone expects infinite process before you’re actually able to execute any removal.
In the Garcia case, the government made a mistake by not complying with that withholding offer (I’ll assume that it was indeed a mistake, and not deliberate flouting of the order, because otherwise the below argument doesn’t apply). Liberals, moderates, and centrists seem to believe that the outcome at hand means that the Garcia’s right to due process was not met, and district and some appellate judges seem to believe that too. There is an implication here that if Garcia’s due process rights were met, he would not have been deported to El Salvador. This is not so. There is no amount of due process that will prevent government from ever making mistakes of this sort, and excessive efforts of judiciary and activists using the judiciary to prevent mistakes meaningfully detract from the Executive’s ability to execute its core function.
The simple fact is that there is absolutely no existing process that could have prevented this mistake. Garcia had final, confirmed on appeal order to be removed. He had no further ability to appeal it. If the government removed him to a different country, that would have been it. This is how the process works, not just in immigration, but in every case.
For example, imagine you’re a tenant who stopped paying rent. Landlord goes through legal process to get you evicted, you appeal, but since you’re clearly in the wrong, ultimately you get a final eviction order. Accordingly, you get a notice from sheriff’s office that you’ll get evicted on May 1st, approved by court. However, on April 30th, the sheriff looks at the calendar wrong, and thinks that your eviction date is today, and evicts you. A clear mistake, in violation of court order to remove you on May 1st. However, is it a violation of your due process? No, there was absolutely no judicial process that you were not given access to, that would have prevented your too early eviction. What is the legal remedy that you should be accorded after the fact? I actually don’t know. I would actually be fine with no remedy or damages at all: the government does extremely detrimental things to people all the time that have no remedy whatsoever, the sovereign/qualified immunity and all that, but if you insisted on some damages, I’d accept the sheriff reimbursing you for any actual cost caused by too early eviction, like eg. one night hotel stay.
Now, imagine a judge ordering the sheriff to kick the landlord out of the freshly vacated home, and effectuate your return to the home that you were about to get evicted from anyway. It just so happens that you were also a wanted fugitive on federal charges, and as you were getting evicted by state officers, federal officers use the opportunity to arrest you and throw you in federal prison. The judge then require the state sheriff to somehow “facilitate” your release from federal prison, without specifying in any way whatsoever as to how exactly you are supposed to do it, or what that even means. Lastly, it issues a statewide injunction on any evictions unless you get one more hearing after final (already appealed) eviction order, with another ability to appeal the outcome of that hearing, to prevent additional future eviction mistakes.
Most people would see this as a mockery of justice, an excessive concern for the rights of someone who is clearly in the wrong, and meaningful making it even more difficult for people who are in the right to have their rights enforced. And yet, here we are.
wlxd
7mo ago
Collapse the entire education Ponzi by making student loans forgivable in bankruptcy.
That’s an extremely counterproductive idea as stated if the goal is to attack schooling industry. It would be a huge boon to schooling industry if these were dischargeable. Instead, what you need to do is to stop the federal government providing the loans.
wlxd
2yr ago
At her age, success rate per cycle is around 30%. This means that she’ll almost certainly require a couple of tries before she gives birth, which means that the second pregnancy attempt will almost certainly not happen sooner than 2 years later. By then, the chance of success will halve to less than 20%.
And that’s all assuming she starts tomorrow, instead of needing to find a partner and getting him to commit to having children together, which will take months on its own.
wlxd
2yr ago
You are missing the point. Sure, you can certainly make the case that Jacob Chansley’s actions were criminal if you look only at the bare letter of the law, and ignore context. The argument is, however, that there have been thousands of other people, hundreds in the specific example of Kavanaugh hearings, that also broke the bare letter of the law in roughly the same degree of egregiousness as Chansley, but none of whom even faced anything close to criminal trial, much less years in prison. The argument here is about malicious prosecution which is completely outside historical norms for the behavior.
Imagine, for example, that federal government found that some of these protesters are not US citizens, but permanent residents, and found that they are not carrying their green card, as required by law, and charged them with misdemeanor and put them for 30 days in jail. The letter of the law clearly allows that, but it would be completely outrageous, as this law is never enforced in any other circumstance, so it would be hard to see it as anything other than malicious political targeting.
wlxd
2yr ago
They don’t get to just stop funding everything. Assume that pursuing the war is in US/NATO interest. Suppose they make a decision, and Zelensky (or whoever is also taking part on Ukrainian side) disagrees. They cannot just withdraw their funds and their support: this would damage Ukrainian’s strategic position, and reduce the chances of successful military outcomes. It would be cutting their noses to spite their faces.
This does not mean that they have no say in what Ukraine does. They do, but so do the Ukrainian rulers.
wlxd
2yr ago
The West has not even started to massively expand its production capacity, and our peace time production capacity is order of magnitude too low to keep up. By the time we get on that, it might be all over.
The West is no longer the place where things are built, where factories pop up, where you can find tens of millions of people who know how to operate a bridgeport, lathe, or a rivet gun. It’s no longer in our DNA. We outsource that shit to China.
I think many westerners look at the achievements of their grandparents and great grandparents, and believe that we could do the same. We can’t. We would need to change our entire culture, and we won’t do that in a matter of months. My hope is that the current predicament at least causes our society to get on that path and start to grow serious. Might be the only way to recover from current degeneracy.
wlxd
2yr ago
To my understanding this represents an escalation of the war, wherein NATO forces commanded by Nato leadership are directly involved in a major offensive for the first time.
Which NATO forces? What country of origin, which unit?
Among soldiers in the offensive there certainly are some who served in NATO militaries before, but this does not make the offensive force NATO. It’s makes as much sense as saying that it’s the Soviets who invaded Ukraine, because some soldiers in Russian force served in Soviet Union.
wlxd
3mo ago
Can you explain how it is a problem? It's not immediately clear to me, and it's apparently not immediately clear to most of the legal systems around the world, given that they do not subscribe to the extensive application of this doctrine.
wlxd
4mo ago
No, parsing bits from a video file does happen practically instantly. Download a video file to your local disk, and play it from there, you’ll see. Even on YouTube, if you rewind back, it will have to represent the bytes again.
The reason it takes a while for YouTube stream to start is that this is what it takes for YouTube to locate the bytes you asked for and start streaming them to you.
wlxd
1yr ago
Do you imagine that a lasting peace is going to be achieved by killing thousands of innocents to get rid of Hamas?
It’s pretty easy to imagine when you look at some historical examples, eg. pacification of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in WWII, which in fact resulted in not only lasting peace, but in fact strong alliance with the former adversary who killed hundreds of thousands of innocents using the same tactics used by Israel today.
wlxd
2yr ago
The market expectations for inflation might expect it to go down, but they also didn’t expect the inflation to happen in the first place. These have been consistently wrong for past year, why should we believe these are correct now?
See for example the nice graph in this blog post.
wlxd
2yr ago
That’s what I am conflicted about. Sure, there is no fundamental reasons why the west/US couldn’t mine and extract its own lithium, so that it’s not dependent on China. But, would it actually be able to do it in practice? Would the overcome the political, NIMBY, environmental, ecological etc opposition? Can they actually get necessary know how and workforce to build what is needed?
Consider the current energy crisis in Europe. Seems like the obvious answer would be to just go all in on nuclear fission. Is this what is happening? No, European countries seem like to be more into trying to survive winter, expanding LNG terminals, and hoping that there is enough LNG capacity in future. Will there be? Can they depend on their US ally providing all of it? No, US is still not pushing hard into expanding fossils, instead we still go all in on ESG.
Seems to me that even if it is clear what needs to be done, the ability to actually pull it off is no longer there, there is no leader to pull the Realpolitik off and align everyone towards the goal. Instead, we get the standard multitude of interest groups that just makes everything impossible to build, as usual.
wlxd
1mo ago
Please, do the math. Get some data on how many wealthy people are there, how much you expect to get from each, multiply one figure by the other, and get surprised about how paltry it is.
As it happens, US already has the most progressive tax system of all developed countries. In US, it is disproportionately the wealthy how pay the bulk of the taxes. In contrast to that, in Europe, the bulk of the taxes is paid by the middle class. For example: in US, you only enter the 32% tax bracket once you’re above $192k/year. In France, and I shit you not, you start paying 30% tax starting from 27.5k EUR. On top of that, when you actually try to spend whatever you’re left with, you pay 20% VAT, whereas in US, the highest sales tax rarely exceeded 10-11%.
The result is that people making 60k EUR/year are the backbone of French budget, whereas in US, if you make $60k, you barely pay any tax at all, considering deductions, EITC, etc.
Seriously, just do the math.
wlxd
1mo ago
You are not arguing against how this law would be typically applied (because obviously police cannot search a typical person every time he steps out of his home), but against some extreme overapplication, highly unlikely in practice.
I don’t think it is a particularly strong objection, given that we already have plenty of laws today that, if applied to such extreme degree, would be just as annoying, they just are never used like that.
For an explicit example: if you operate any radio station (including CB radio, so that’s not limited to holders of amateur radio license), you are legally obligated to allow FCC employees to inspect your radio station. They don’t even need any sort of warrant. They just show up at your door, and you must let them in, under risk of penalties. Theoretically, they could reinspect you every 3 hours. In practice, this just never happens.
The point is that the government that feels that it’s fine to inspect or search you every 3 hours is not the kind of a government that would be prevented from doing so should the words on the paper said it couldn’t. Tyranny is about the government desiring and executing its abilities to keep inspecting and searching normal people continuously, not about their legal ability to do so.
First, that isn't something the federal government is allowed to do per the Constitution.
As much as I sympathize with this point of view, Mr Filburn, given the legal developments over last 100 years, I can scarcely think that national ID cards is the most advantageous location to pick this battle.
Second, I don't want even the states accelerating the panopticon by incorporating all our biometrics into it.
What is meaningfully changed in your life by state learning your biometrics? What kind of realistic nightmare scenarios are prevented by preventing Feds from issuing national biometric IDs? I really cannot think of any.
I don't know what benefits you have in mind, but I can't think of any which are not dwarfed by that massive cost.
Improving elections integrity, for one thing.
Anyway, I really disagree that there is massive cost here, and I think you are not doing a good job articulating it. Consider, for example, other countries that do have national ID systems on top of very comprehensive census registries. This covers almost the entire Europe, for example. To the extent these countries are controlling panopticons (which, to be sure, they to a large extent are when compared to US), I cannot think of any aspects of that panopticon that would be meaningfully relaxed by making their population registries less comprehensive, or their ID systems less centralized. I’d be happy to hear concrete counterexamples, if you can think of any.
wlxd
1yr ago
What you are trying to do here is to use “racist” as a thought-terminating cliche, which eradicates the need to address the arguments being made on their merits. It is not surprising that you do it, as this strategy has worked amazingly well for last 60 years. The problem is that this only works if all sides of conversation share the same assumptions, that being racist is the worst thing ever, and it automatically entails you are wrong. Overusing this strategy has led to many people rejecting this assumption, and being much less impressed by the “racist” card.
Yes, BAP is racist, but the real question is, is he right or wrong?
I specifically mentioned the Russian puppet state of Belarus to point out that you can do much better than Ukraine while remaining in Russian orbit. My point was that if Ukraine experienced decades of stagnation while in Russian orbit while Belarus grew, why expect much different outcomes in western orbit?
Poland left the Communist Bloc years before USSR broke up. They managed that through diplomacy and negotiations, not western warmongering. Ukraine should try the same.
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