wlxd
5mo ago
AIDS and Malaria cannot “just make a jump”. AIDS only is a thing in western world thanks to gays and drug addicts. Without them, we’d, uhm, flatten the curve by now (in fact, it would probably never become a thing in the first place, it only became a thing thanks to gay Canadian flight attendant who really liked to fuck random guys in places he flew into).
Malaria is not a disease that spreads from person to person, and we cannot have malaria become a thing in US, because we already stopped it being a thing. We used to have malaria in US, and we destroyed the conditions that allowed malaria to exist. We can’t have malaria now without recreating this condition, which, given the land use patterns, is highly unlikely.
wlxd
5mo ago
If you do literally nothing, the gays and drug addicts will just die from AIDS. I really don’t understand what’s so complicated about it. It’s not even like they have no way of avoiding the fate: all they need to do is to stop rawdogging random guys and stop sharing needles. It’s really not complicated.
wlxd
5mo ago
I doubt that, mostly because I don’t believe that the promiscuous party boy gays that use condoms use them 100% of the time.
wlxd
5mo ago
This is wrong. Helicopter was communicating with tower. Tower was transmitting on VHF, and helicopter on UHF. There is no recording of helicopter yet because we only VHF ones now. Within a couple of days/weeks we’ll have recording including heli pilot responses.
wlxd
5mo ago
surely it makes sense to do away with the ineffective government programmes first, not the coolest federal programme in history
This is extremely weak, because we can do away with both at the same time. If that guy can name some programs you think are less effective than PEPFAR, let him do it, and we will cancel those in addition to cancelling PEPFAR.
International coordination would itself be a coordination problem?
No. Coordination problem is when individual action is mostly ineffective, and it’s only when everyone agrees on something, you get a benefit. Here, half of spend gets you half of benefit, so you don’t need to get all the countries to agree and coordinate, just make the case for them, and whoever wants to pitch in will be able to.
The absence of other countries having an equivalent program isn't a strong argument that we shouldn't maintain the original.
If you think so, you are very far removed from how normal people think. Why do you think cafes make sure tip jars are made of transparent material, and make sure there is always some change inside?
wlxd
5mo ago
If you don’t have any credit history, you have good credit, not bad credit. I have arrived in US with no credit history at all, and at no point my credit score was below 700.
wlxd
5mo ago
How is this relevant in any way? Of course that is what the official policy has to be. At the same time, Taiwan invasion is the number one strategic concern of DoD, ahead of Russian war in Ukraine. Talk to anyone with DoD relationship, in either public or private sector.
wlxd
5mo ago
Well, yes, if the US didn’t care about Taiwan’s independence, or strategic presence in the Pacific, then yeah, Guam would be useless. However, for better or worse, it does, and so Guam is a valuable asset. In any case, your comment about official US Taiwan policy is completely irrelevant to the issue.
wlxd
4mo ago
And yet 4years later apparently nobody cares anymore. Either the cost was highly inflated, or Texas is just such a beast that it shrugs off things like that.
wlxd
4mo ago
Why would you hate it? The only downside I can conceive are trivial relative to benefits.
wlxd
4mo ago
That scarcely seem to me like something to worry about. We already need IDs for many normal activities. Having those issued on federal level would not change much, and in fact would probably be an improvement for reasons like Voter ID.
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
4mo ago
What would help is if you actually articulated how exactly national ID cards give government more power over you, relative to status quo. You claim this, but this is far from obvious to me.
wlxd
4mo ago
This argument proves too much. It’s not an argument specifically against federal ID cards, but against any and all ID cards, including state issued ones. Given that none of this is a problem with state issued IDs, I don’t find this vision very likely.
wlxd
4mo ago
First, disparate impact doctrine has nothing to do with it. At best you could argue that it’s related to equal protection.
More importantly, this is a fully general arguments against any laws. Why prohibit theft if it’s just a bludgeon when the your political opponents are the ones controlling law enforcement?
wlxd
4mo ago
He makes sure to tax the wealthy more so they can't afford to raise an army against him and become the new king.
This confused me, because feudal monarchy worked on pretty much opposite principle. It was a duty of the wealthy nobles to raise and fund their armies when needed. This was something the king required them to do, not inhibited from.
That’s not the case here at all. NIH, NSF and the like have enormous amounts of discretion where they allocate funds, even if it appears to be earmarked.
For example, huge chunk of NIH funds are earmarked for cancer research. The result of this is grant applications for this money have to include some section about how their research is related to study of cancer, and this is enough for it to qualify. I learned this from some of my friends doing biotech research. Literally all of them work under cancer research grant, but their actual research has very little to do with cancer per se.
How to study AIDS on cancer grant? Easy: AIDS causes cancer, so AIDS prevention reduces cancer incidence. Done. No need to reallocate anything in Congress.
You don’t need to move any funds. You can study AIDS on cancer institute funds. You can study it on kidney institute funds. You can do it on infections diseases institute funds. As I said, the way the system works is that NIH has enormous amount of discretion here. The only way to prevent it would be to literally have executive tell the underlings explicitly to stop funding AIDS, or have Congress pass explicit law prohibiting them from doing so.
Fraud is generally not covered by Congressional appropriations.
I’m literally telling you how the actual system works in practice. You can keep talking about appropriations and chide me for using the word “earmark” in a technically incorrect sense, but it is you who has no idea about how biotech funding actually works. Doing biomedical research that only tangentially concerns cancer under cancer grant is not fraud, it’s a day that ends in y. Talk to literally anyone in biomedical research.
wlxd
4mo ago
A typical use of cancer funds is a grant where you GMO some bacteria to produce some protein, which you then concentrate, crystallize, then do some X-ray crystallography to analyze its structure. What does it have to do with cancer? Oh right, that protein may lead to a cancer drug, maybe. But, you know, it might also lead to AIDS drug! Who knows.
wlxd
4mo ago
The Zoe Post was the turning point for me as well. Before that, I bought into the whole progressivism. After seeing them eviscerate Eron, who obvious victim of abuse, I understood that actually we are the baddies. It really changed my entire perspective. What really sealed the deal was Untitled, though.
wlxd
4mo ago
Syria and Lebanon are outside Europe and thus outside the responsibility of the EU anyway.
Imagine what the world stage would look like if US shared this attitude.
wlxd
4mo ago
The point is that this answer is just incorrect. There are non Hausdorff one point compactifications of Hausdorff spaces. You need additional assumption of local compactness for it to be true.
wlxd
4mo ago
"Is the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space itself Hausdorff?" The correct answer is yes, or so I'm told.
It’s not true. You need to also assume that the original space is locally compact. For example, if you one-point compactify the space of rational numbers (which is obviously Hausdorff), the resulting space is non-Hausdorff. That’s because the only compact subsets of rationals are discrete, and thus finite, so open subsets that contain the added point at infinity are exactly of the form Q plus the extra point minus some finite subset. This means that it intersects every other nonempty open subset (because all open subsets of that space are infinite). Thus, you cannot separate the point at infinity from any other point by two disjoint open sets, because there are no disjoint open sets from the ones that contain the point at infinity.
Yes, the letters on a screen won’t stop you, but the cease and desist letter and lawsuit for damages will. I’m sure you realize that.
As for the partnership idea, this is an obvious non-starter. No competitor would ever want that. What would they even get out of it that would make up for the downsides?
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