yunyun333
9hr ago
The Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage, not treason. The last person executed for treason was during the Civil War.
yunyun333
2d ago
China, or any other country, cannot just snap their fingers and go to war. Spinning up the war machine takes time and is very visible. If there were any inkling that they were seriously moving towards a war footing, this pseudo regime change op would end.
The bigger relevance is that of volume. How many interceptors does the US have, and how many can it produce? Any Chinese invasion would be kicked off with missiles aimed at every US airfield in the region; can they be protected? What does the supply of radars look like? Etc.
yunyun333
3d ago
A month ago the airspace around El Paso was closed because a military AA system shot down a DHS drone. Probably not relevant, but you never know with this administration.
yunyun333
3d ago
Pre FDR there was essentially no federal welfare of any kind, just local poorhouses and a single mothers/elderly pension at the state level. Then you had social security/welfare with FDR, medicare/medicaid/food stamps with LBJ, clinton's overhaul, and ACA medicaid expansion, to name a few.
The uniquely American aspect of spirit that prevented socialism from ever getting a serious grip appears to have washed away somewhat. Now people look to European countries that spend 2-3x federally on welfare.
yunyun333
5d ago
9/11 was carried out by (mainly) Saudi nationals based from Afghanistan. The Beirut bombing would be a better example.
yunyun333
6d ago
The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan was never 'getting in'. In Iraq we were actually there to nation build and the CPA fucked it up. In Afghanistan we could conceivably have declared 'mission accomplished' and left if we got OBL, but alas...
Warlord Hajji Zaman spelled this out for me one evening poolside at the Intercontinental, one of Kabul’s two luxury hotels. He wore rimless gold glasses and sported a pristinely coiffed beard, a look that belied his adventurous past as a commander in eastern Afghanistan. In December 2001, when Osama bin Laden and hundreds of other Arabs fled to the Tora Bora Mountains along the Pakistani border, Zaman had pocketed huge sums of money from the United States for his services in hunting them down.
“The Americans came to me because they knew only I could get the job done,” he said, raising a glass of scotch to his lips. He sat stiffly straight, a Kalashnikov leaning on one leg. On either side lolled a pair of bodyguards, who seemed to have had a few too many. The tinkling of a piano filled the air, and Western women dangled their feet in the pool. “This whole land,” he said, sweeping his hand across hundreds of tiny house lights studding the mountains around the city, “this whole land is filled with thieves and liars. This is what you Americans have made.” He ordered another round. “I know this game, I know how to survive.” He was slurring his words by now. “I went to the Americans and said, ‘I can find bin Laden.’ I told them, ‘Give me $5 million and I’ll bring you his head.’ So they went and talked to their bosses and arranged it, and I got $5 million. Then, a few days later, I went to al Qaeda and told them, ‘Give me $1 million or I’ll turn you over to the Americans.’ So they gave me $1 million, and I convinced the Americans to stop the bombing for a little while. I told them we could use the time to find Osama, but really it was so those Arab dogs could escape to Pakistan. Then I went to the ISI,” the Pakistani intelligence agency, “and said, ‘Give me $500,000 and I’ll give you al Qaeda.’ They pulled a gun and told me to get out of their face.”
yunyun333
8d ago
https://x.com/i/status/2027578652477821175
Not insane enough for OpenAI, swooping in for the steal.
yunyun333
9d ago
The funny part is that a large part of the funding is from the Saudis.
Anyways, it will probably work itself out. Paramount was financially struggling, and massively overpaying for Warner Bros famously hasn't worked out for much healthier companies.
yunyun333
16d ago
Georgia expanded Medicaid with work requirements (which are coming to every state soon) in 2023. So far they've paid Deloitte about $90m to enroll about 10k people, with 2/3 of that cost being administrative. Surprisingly, that's not that terrible compared to Georgia's average of $5k medicaid spending per enrollee, but still quite a bit of waste to cover what should be a healthier population.
yunyun333
19d ago
"Hard" and "weak" are simply so vague as to make the theory virtually unfalsifiable. And there are so many other factors going into military prowess and conflict that make the connection extremely weak at best. Did the hard times of Vietnam and the 70s make the US better at kicking Saddam's ass, or were the two wars too different for any comparison? Something like the Schlesinger liberal-conservative cycle lays out somewhat clearer parameters.
yunyun333
30d ago
Russia is waging a territory-centric war to secure the Donbas, probably so they can declare victory and wind down operations as much as possible. Ukraine is more attrition-aligned but territory is still necessary because it's good PR when Pokrovsk/Kupyansk/??? Holds. Syrsky is known as General 200 and loves his 'meat' counterattacks, but the Russians are performing similarly brutal operations. The Europeans have tried to pick up the slack from Trump but Belgium refused to liquidate frozen Russian assets. So, who really knows what's happening?
yunyun333
1mo ago
In 2024 several protestors in Bristol broke into an Elbit Systems defense factory with sledgehammers attempting to smash up the place. Police arrived and in the fracas one officer was hit in the back and seriously injured. They were acquitted on charges of aggravated burglary and partial or no verdicts were reached on criminal damage, violent disorder, and grievous bodily harm with intent.
Charlotte Head, 29, Samuel Corner, 23, Leona Kamio, 30, Fatema Zainab Rajwani, 21, Zoe Rogers, 22, and Jordan Devlin, 31, were all acquitted of aggravated burglary by the jury after more than 36 hours of deliberation. Rajwani, Rogers and Devlin were found not guilty of violent disorder, while the jury could not reach verdicts on the same charge against Head, Corner and Kamio. The jury could also not reach verdicts on an additional charge of criminal damage. Corner had also denied causing grievous bodily harm with intent for hitting a female police sergeant with a sledgehammer. The jury was unable to agree a verdict on that count.
The defense argued that the action did not rise to the level of GBH with intent, which is defined as
“Whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously by any means whatsoever wound or cause any grievous bodily harm to any person with intent to do some grievous bodily harm to any person, or with intent to resist or prevent the lawful apprehension or detainer of any person.”
For a Section 18 GBH charge to be proven, it must be shown that the offender physically caused the serious injuries and, at the same time as the assault took place, that this is what they intended to cause. It is the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing that constitutes part of a crime. For a case to be considered under Section 18, identifying reckless behaviour in the actions of the offender will not be sufficient enough to find an accused individual guilty. The act must be malicious in nature and deliberate, indicating malice aforethought often with a degree of premeditation.
Instead, Mr. Corner, an autistic man, was pepper sprayed, confused, and attempting to defend his comrade being restrained and arrested, so malicious intent was not present.
It should also be noted that protestors put up jury nullification signs around the trial.
yunyun333
1mo ago
There are economists who argue that employer health insurance tax exclusion pushes up overall costs. The ACA's cadillac tax was repealed before it came into effect, so we'll never know.
New epstein files stash released - search here: https://www.justice.gov/epstein
Trump is mentioned lots of times though some of the more lurid accusations (I was gangbanged by Trump and a bunch of other rich dudes) seem to be non credible. Epstein emailed himself about how he was annoyed that Bill Gates needed medicine from banging underage russian girls - probably fake blackmail. He also got banned from Xbox Live, shared coomer FNAF 4chan threads, talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences, getting advice on silencing a girl trying to expose his friends. For our global-intelligence-conspiracy friends, there are some connections to intelligence agencies.
Mods, remove this if it's a crappy post. It's hard to come up with a through line for this, other than "WOW he knew a lot of people".
yunyun333
1mo ago
But the ICE agents didn't shoot him as he was approaching them with gun in holster. They got him down on the ground, one agent took his gun, and the other agent shot him from behind as he was getting up (?).
yunyun333
1mo ago
Wouldn't you expect him to react more demonstratively? He looks back over his shoulder, not at the gun in his hand. All the other ICE agents wrestling with Pretti flinch back as though the shot was from the agent who pulls out his own gun (in video 1).
Who fired the first shot (at 21 seconds in the first video)? Logically it should have been the agent in center who pulls out his gun at 15 seconds and points it at Pretti. He obviously fires the second shot at 26 seconds - you can see the slide move and the casing eject. None of the other agents appears to have a gun in hand (other than the guy who pulls Pretti's gun from the holster and immediately turns and walks away).
Listening carefully, the first and second-fourth shots sound different. Does that have any significance?
yunyun333
1mo ago
Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’
A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart.
Mainstream geneticists have rejected their work as biased and unscientific. Yet by relying on genetic and other personal data from the prominent project, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the researchers gave their theories an air of analytical rigor. Members of the research group were ineligible to obtain data from the ABCD project. But one of them gained access through an American professor who was already being investigated by the N.I.H. over his handling of another child brain study. Their papers have provided fodder for racist posts on social media and white nationalist message boards that have been viewed millions of times. Some of the papers are cited by A.I. bots like ChatGPT and Grok in response to queries about race and intelligence. On the social media platform X, Grok has referred users to the research more than two dozen times this month alone.
The misuse of the children’s data has validated longstanding concerns that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ genetic information held by the N.I.H. could fall into the wrong hands. The agency grants widespread access to stimulate new medical discoveries. But critics say the N.I.H. has failed to address the risks that the data, even with personally identifiable details removed, could be misused in unethical research, for commercial purposes or by foreign adversaries. The Times learned that in 2024, the same data was improperly obtained by an unidentified researcher in China. The data is not allowed to be shared with people in adversarial countries that could use it for blackmail, spy recruitment or military purposes. But the researcher evaded that prohibition by faking an affiliation with an American university, according to a former N.I.H. official and Dr. Jernigan, who said the agency informed her of the incident.
This debate is extremely opaque currently. For the interested outsider you have to go deep into the weeds of advanced statistics to follow along. Scott has some recent posts on the 'heritability gap' but it still makes my eyes glaze over. Optimistically, GWAS analyses will get more powerful, and environmental racial gaps will close, and the answer will be clearer in a few decades. The 'misuse' of anonymized data (what horrible crimes can the CCP and Ruzzia do with this?) is hardly that big a deal, but it will be kept under stronger lock and key in future.
yunyun333
1mo ago
It's possible that they've reached peak carbon emissions already. US carbon emissions peaked in 2007, a two-decade lag time seems reasonable.
yunyun333
1mo ago
Several EU countries sent tripwire forces into Greenland a few days ago. Now Trump has announced 10% tariffs on imported goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. As a sidenote, despite predictions of economic catastrophe, Trump's tariffs have been smaller and done less economic damage than estimated.
For starters, inflation is running below projections. In December, the just-announced inflation rate was 2.7 percent. The Fed’s favorite indicator was unchanged from November when the core inflation rate, at 2.6 percent, was the lowest since 2021.
Tariffs have had surprisingly little impact on higher consumer prices. “Tariff pass‑through to consumers has been much milder than anticipated,” Olu Sonola, head of U.S. economic research at Fitch Ratings, wrote in a recent research note. Yet revenue from tariffs brought in close to $300 billion in 2025, up from about $80 billion in 2024, and is currently on track to produce over $350 billion this year.
The evidence suggests that most costs are being absorbed by foreign exporters or by domestic sellers accepting lower profit margins. And since the actual tariffs on different countries are a crazy quilt of different rates, producers have also become expert at shifting their supply chains to countries with relatively lower tariffs. In addition, it’s easy to overstate the impact of tariffs on household costs, since imports are only about 14 percent of GDP. In other words, there are no tariffs on 86 percent of GDP.
The high tariff rate on China skews the averages. Excluding China, the effective tariff rate on the rest of the world, adjusting for trade share and exempt categories, is not the average 17 percent. It’s well below 10 percent. Thanks in part to the tariffs, the chronic U.S. global trade deficit has been shrinking. The October deficit was $29.4 billion, down nearly 40 percent from September. The decline continued in November, the last month for which statistics are available.
Still, no one knows what's the next step of Trump's master plan. Will it fizzle like the whole "Canada 51st state" thing? Polymarket estimates 27% chance that Trump will take "part of Greenland" in 2026.
yunyun333
1mo ago
The point is, you should be ruling on easy mode when you have a money printer in the ground, but he still managed to get overthrown, without significant foreign interference.
yunyun333
1mo ago
The oil boom was obviously not sustainable but the Shah's incompetence was unique. Every other oil state managed to not piss off their entire population.
yunyun333
2mo ago
Ultra niche markets would obviously be rife with insider betting. Fool and his money, etc.
yunyun333
2mo ago
It's on page 30 as 'eliminations'.
UHC pays its own doctors more, and in general insurance companies will steer customers towards their own, more expensive facilities, but there's limited studies on how it affects care in general. You'd think that it should increase the number of procedures done at least, but that's not so clear.
The study found that when independent physicians integrated with a hospital, they changed their care practices (for example, by reducing the number of patients they put under deep sedation) and increased their throughput (measured by the number of patients they treated). Specifically, the integrated physicians reduced their use of deep sedation by about 3.7 patients for every 100 treated. However, patients of integrated physicians experienced “a significant increase in both major post-colonoscopy complications such as bleeding (3.8 per 1,000 colonoscopies) and other complications such as cardiac or nonserious GI symptoms (5.0 and 3.3 per 1,000 colonoscopies, respectively).”
The researchers found that the reduced use of deep sedation “at least partially explains the increase in adverse outcomes” and that it was “driven mainly by hospitals no longer allocating expensive anesthesiologists to relatively unprofitable colonoscopy procedures.”
Moreover, integration increased the number of patients a physician was able to treat and elevated reimbursement per procedure—integrated doctors were reimbursed about $127 more per colonoscopy procedure than independent doctors, or about 48% more.
Judging by the assessment of John McNaughton (assistant secdef for international security affairs) in March 1965, we achieved 20% of our aims.
More options
Context Copy link