xablor
7mo ago
There really aren't ANY apps that just pass the API costs on to users? It's been months, surely that's enough time to figure out an instrumentation layer and a payments provider integration.
xablor
8mo ago
You might be encouraged by recent work in current-gen small modular reactors. Oak Ridge National Labs is standing up 6 of them, a few efforts got approved to start construction, and the US military is obviously interested given their focus on expeditionary logistics.
xablor
8mo ago
What compromise could the right offer the left that they would want?
Did you actually read the (offhanded, I admit) proposal? It was short. It involved creating a state-level capacity to locate disenfranchised (read: poor, illegal, disabled, low-executive) people and extend state services to them. Inside five years it'll be the premier way to access lumpenproles to buy votes from them. What compromise is possibly better than actually, actively, implementing your opposition's agenda for them?
EDIT: You reacted to it, so you must have. I am confused.
xablor
8mo ago
Because ‘voting accessibility programs’ are just funding for democrat political machines
I mean. Yes? That's the point, to give both sides part of what they want. Democrats want funding for democrat political machines.
tighter requirements for voter authorization are totally off the table for democrats
This I'm more ignorant on. There really aren't any minority sub-parties that don't care about the topic that can't be peeled off?
xablor
8mo ago
Naive policy engineering again, American electoral reform edition:
Team Red claims to want "reinforced" elections, where the risk of people casting a vote who shouldn't be able to is minimized or eliminated. A common proposed mechanism is to use state IDs to validate that the holder has the right to vote in that state or federal election, and (I imagine) to enforce one-vote-per-person. They prefer the decision to be biased in favor of minimizing false positives at the cost of increased false negatives and possibly true positives.
Team Blue opposes this with rhetoric about wanting to maximize access to the electoral systems at all levels. They prefer to maximize true positives and minimize false negatives at the cost of false positives, the symmetric opposite of Red, as in all things.
Left unstated is the assumption, seemingly held in common by both Red and Blue, that people who have a hard time obtaining state IDs are likely to vote Blue.
A compromise solution seems to exist, and I don't understand why it's not being pursued: increase funding for voting accessibility programs, in exchange for tighter requirements for voting authorization. Have, literally, a list of people who were born in state, can't be accounted for as having left the state, and authorize a spend of $10k or whatever to find them and Get Them Registered No Matter The Cost.
One thought: spending on this is a continuous value, whereas a policy state IDs as a bearer authentication token are boolean. Fine, hold state IDs out as a carrot, and offer improvements in, I don't know, signature matching in mail-in ballots.
In summary, two symmetrical problems exist, there exist opportunities to progress towards solving both of them, no serious efforts are being taken. Why? Per the meme, are they just stupid?
xablor
8mo ago
Off-the-cuff gradualist proposal to play with, and maybe be an existence proof: fedgov only guarantees 95% of a loan balance, measured as an amount of approved loan principle. Or whatever amount is needed to see a signal emerge (is part of your point that the minimum amount to see that is too large to be viable?). This paired with, I dunno, earmarks for grants for some of those who are impacted, to add palatability to lefty opposition and keep incentives straight for borrowers.
What doesn't work there?
xablor
8mo ago
Can we add an iterator over new comments since the last time a user loaded a thread? They have their own unique CSS class, looks like, so the server-side logic already exists to detect them. This might even be doable purely as a client-side bit of JS.
xablor
8mo ago
Inspired by college loans discussion earlier, I'd like to apply a policy engineering lens:
- What are the minimal changes necessary to get an epsilon away from the current model of "government guarantees the entire loan amount with no conditions and it's not dischargeable in bankruptcy, with private lenders available" and towards a model that incentivizes better behavior in schools and students?
- Politically, what gets the nose under the tent most effectively, allowing further reforms?
- More generally, it seems difficult to implement a series of small reversible reforms to explore a space; what drives that in a government implemented as largely autonomous opaque agencies, and is it itself reformable?
"The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra", and I hate myself a little more with every page I turn. I'm going to complete it, because I want the knowledge and the skills, but the process constantly rubs my nose in my lack of bandwidth in onboarding even basic definitions, much less keeping abstract structures in my head well enough to even see their implications, much less their interactions.
Related, and secondarily, a video course in convex optimization (is that out of scope? If you lot can brag about classic literature I figure it's on to brag about forcing myself through technical content.) I won't detail it except to say it's humbling; playlist at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8WsPW41L6l7rviIGvIkY0-jn-tM3YSNi if you're curious.
I've rediscovered the US's official congressional record, at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/crec . For whatever reason it's compiled as being distinct from the hearing transcripts, at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/chrg . It's a weird mix of infuriating and humbling, seeing the egoistic grandstanding around things as subtle and varied as the BUILDER act, substantially modifying the National Environmental Policy Act, and as tiny and high-context as tribal treaties from the 1800s interacting with permitting to add a convenience store to a reservation casino. Something about the scale of impact vs the scale of the people involved? These aren't great souls, whether in Congress or the experts they bring to testify, and they're largely not able to make sweeping impacts due to the combined momentum of history, lobbies, budgets, and a few hundred Congressional cats to be herded.
I just wanted to see Jamie Tucker say "shitter" on the record, man.
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