curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
If there's nothing substantial to be gleaned, why is there still so much being actively hidden? Does the Trump admin just engage in coverups for the fun of it?
Yes! They would definitely do that! Many of these people aren't very smart, many of them are very smart but put all their skill ranks in Bluff and not Knowledge, and either way their demonstrated competence over the past year implies they probably aren't going to be intelligently planning what to cover up and not. Consider the documents case, where for a while they could've just, like, returned the documents, but instead they had to make false statements and obstruct the investigation and such.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
Idk. The term and concept of 'sex trafficking' is an ongoing exaggerated moral panic. The conflation of pedophilia (bringing to mind 12-14 year olds) with sex with mostly-consenting 17 year olds is another. But the emails do seem to demonstrate Epstein was acting as a pimp providing women, some of whom were under 18, to powerful men, which is still rather distasteful.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
I don't think it's valid to assume that the 64% that are only about 'lack of sufficient supervision' are because the parents let their kids walk outside alone. The bottom 1% of parents are very bad parents, where lack of supervision probably means 'not parenting them at all, letting them do drugs' than 'letting kids walk around unsupervised'. Even in a world where CPS is terrorizing parents who let their kids walk to the grocery store by themselves, the good or even meh parents will stop doing that after the first or second CPS visit, so that statistic wouldn't be evidence.
Silver has historically crashed all the way back to where it was three weeks ago. Actually, two weeks ago, now that I check. We got as low as a month. I would be careful!
The underlying logic still seems sound (needed for electronics, inflation/weakening USD, increased international drama)
This is a good thesis for why silver should be priced higher than some assumed baseline where we needed less electronics and had less international drama. It's not necessarily a good thesis for why silver should be higher than it is now. Maybe that's already priced in. Maybe it's priced in five times over. How do you know? You should either have a view on the underlying economics / value of the thing, where your decision to buy or sell depends directly on the price, or acknowledge that the last month of price movements have little to do with underlying facts and everything to do with narratives and approach it mostly like you would a shitcoin. In which case, sure, maybe it dumped a little to hard, the narrative still has energy, it was primed for a little more pump when you posted that. But it's important to know why you're buying!
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
A house is an investment! In a combination of the location being one that will be even more valuable than it already is in the future as the economy grows and people agglomerate, and the taxi medallion of already existing in a world of many different land use restrictions.
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
This is all true now, but your '5 to 7' year timeline seems long! LLMs were not anywhere near where they are now 2 years ago, and with simple extrapolation 2 years from now I think it's as likely as not they'll be able to handle legacy code just fine, just like humans can.
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
This seems absurd about a 98-year old judge. It seems far more likely to me that the 98 (!) year old judge is just genuinely having cognitive issues. I have some elderly relatives who are younger than that and are about as sharp as you can hope for at that age, but just like with LLMs if you speak to them for a few minutes the picture is different than if you do for a few hours, and neither I nor they would want them to be federal judges.
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
I disagree with your claim that Unikowsky's analysis on Trump is outcome-driven against him. Directly, you accused him of letting his bias against Trump drive him to think that Trump could be removed from the ballot. Yet, when the case was actually decided, you can read Unikowsky's take on it. He doesn't explicitly say what he thinks should've been decided, but while he thinks that from the 'law nerd' perspective it's wrong, he ultimately seems more sympathetic than not to the claim that the practical consequences of keeping Trump on the ballot mean it's worth deciding it 'wrongly'. Which is outcome-driven in the other direction!
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
I think the replies are somewhat overstating how bad LLMs are - they do have all those failure modes, but the rate at which they fail in those ways isn't that high. And also sort of assuming that the alternative is any better - getting a smart domain expert to spend some time answering you question is of course much better than getting an LLM to, but you weren't gonna do that anyway. At the same time, I agree that 'I (nonexpert) asked Claude and it said this' isn't that useful of a contribution, and when not guided by an expert the LLMs are probably not gonna be that informative on an issue of this complexity.
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
Sorry to bump the thread again, but I think I disagree with this claim. It is a lawyer's job to make the best possible argument for your client's position. By the standards of the legal profession, if Adam was arguing in front of SCOTUS and didn't make the best possible arguments just because he personally thought that they were probably not as convincing as the best opposing arguments, that would be doing wrong by his clients! I do think there's something a little off there, but it doesn't make sense to hold it against Adam individually. Like let's say he takes a case, researches and thinks about it for a while, and realizes that on balance probably the other side is right. What do you want him to do, give it up? Or make the argument, and then never be allowed to have a personal opinion on any related issues of legal philosophy ever again? And of course it would look pretty bad if you just said 'yeah all that stuff i said in front of the supreme court was wrong lol'. Again I think this situation as a whole is slightly questionable but why should we hold it against a specific person?
[not a lawyer, could be missing something ofc]
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
Amusingly, the order was initially dated February 31 https://twitter.com/ASFleischman/status/2017712436409733160
I tend to be critical of strongly worded opinions that strive to be historic.
But if you're going to do one, you've got to make sure you haven't issued it on the 31st of February
curious_straight_ca
14d ago
Michael Vassar
curious_straight_ca
15d ago
The ... obvious?
There was the DOGE website where they overstated the amount of money they were saving by cancelling contracts by at least 2x in a way that was obvious if you looked at where they claimed to be getting the data and knew how to read. They eventually had to reduce the number. And details that emerged later showed they saved much less than they claimed to. If they had saved as much as they've claimed, it'd show up in overall spending numbers in a way it just hasn't.
There was all the drama over Elon. The thing where he said he'd fire any government employee who didn't write him an email even though he didn't have the authority to do so (discussion before). The claim that "20 million people were receiving Social Security benefits past age 100", which was totally false, because he didn't understand how to interpret the database.
And then eventually:
Exclusive: DOGE 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter
WASHINGTON, Nov 23 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump's pledge to slash the government's size but which critics say delivered few measurable savings.
"That doesn't exist," Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE's status.
It is no longer a "centralized entity," Kupor added, in the first public comments from the Trump administration on the end of DOGE.
This wasn't a complete list, just from memory, but DOGE just didn't work. Which is a shame, because I like the broad concept as I said at the time. But it just didn't.
curious_straight_ca
16d ago
It's entirely possible and in fact extremely likely he's who he really is and it's still disinformation/grift. There's selection bias here, if 95 of 100 Army SF people are reasonable and epistemically virtuous, 4 in 100 are a bit crazy but don't post on social media, and 1 decides to go all out telling ChatGPT to add color to their uninformed speculation and post it on twitter, you'll only see the 1.
With that in mind consider the possibility (just the possibility) that the current administration is not as stupid and incompetent as so many like to imagine it is, and instead is operating within constraints and frameworks you may not have considered.
I have seriously considered this possibility and it just doesn't align with how the administration actually acts. When the administration succeeds, such as when they removed Maduro, it's not something that requires competence on the part of the administration themselves, they just have to give the word, because conservatives already wanted Maduro gone and the US military's already the best in the business. But when anything requires competence on the part of the admin, especially things like Liberation Day, DOGE, they're just poorly executed and don't particularly accomplish their stated goals or any obvious secret ones.
trying to fight them is not a winning move ... how do we remove the maximum number of Illegal immigrants while staying within the bounds of both our capabilities and principles?
If this is true then you've already lost! Your premise is that anything you do that actually removes enough illegal immigrants to matter by your values, to cause the real changes to the American economy and society, by your values will be blocked by business interests who don't like those changes. And your response to that is - how can we remove a small enough number of immigrants that it doesn't actually matter, but we still feel like we're doing something? Why even bother at that point? I don't think the premise is correct, a lot of things are possible, things happen today that didn't seem very possible a few decades ago. I think it's possible a more competent Trump could succeed with mandatory e-verify, and also possible that he could fail, and that Trump mostly just doesn't care enough about generic illegal immigrant laborers (as opposed to criminals from insane asylums in the Congo) to take the risk, and also is acting through the lens of an entertainer and e-verify just isn't good TV.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
Any asset can be a shitcoin if retail bids it hard enough. There are good reasons for silver to have gone up, but nowhere near this much. Retail sees it, like gold, as a way to invest in "hard money", to avoid your dollars being inflated away, except it's cheaper than gold. And then they're not price sensitive about it at all. And then it gets high enough that speculators get washed out by new margin requirements, big buyers of silver get nervous they'll be screwed if it goes up more and lock in the price, people get short squeezed. For the same reason that accurate prices are good for an economy, this is bad for the economy! It causes silver to be inefficiently allocated among productive enterprises, all so gamblers can get their fix, because Seahawks vs Patriots isn't quite as exciting as pumping a trillion dollar market cap asset.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
I am not really a Red Triber but the online right has no end of weird sexualized insults towards the left. Many of them are funny. Sexualized insults are pretty common among young guys in general
ICE has deployed approximately 3000 federal agents to Minneapolis. Supposing ICE is in fact, after the bad guys, they should probably be done by now, because they only had to arrest five people each in order to get all of the highly criminal illegals out.
What? How are you expecting 3000 people to investigate 15,000 crimes and arrest 15,000 people in a month? The hard part of making an arrest isn't handcuffing the guy and driving him away, you need to figure out who committed the crime!
ICE should have plenty of evil criminals and pedophiles and whatnot to chase down - how and why do they have the time to go get this guy who appears to be causing no issues, other than being illegal
Many Republicans want to deport all the illegal immigrants! Even if they haven't committed any crimes. It's a whole thing. They have a lot of arguments for it They may be bad arguments, but if you're going to make this point to said Republicans you need to engage with those arguments.
Many other republicans and centrists only want to deport 'migrant criminals' and are uncomfortable uprooting the lives of people who aren't bothering anyone. Which is why Trump focuses on the people from 'jails and insane asylums' and vacillates about who exactly should be deported. But the people running ICE and the people you're arguing with here mostly just want to deport them all.
I agree with (c), and agree with (d) insofar as Trump and many allies don't want the political backlash it'd create to actually deport them all, but to say their sole goal is 'to intimidate and cause chaos' is reductive. The Trump Administration is not a singular coherent entity, you can't reason out their goals by assuming their actions are well thought through. Some people inside the admin really want to deport them all, and tend to have control over and focus more on ICE or immigration policy. And, yeah, want to intimidate the city libs and use the chaos to signal to potential illegal immigrants it's not worth coming. And often don't understand that their theater isn't the same as the real thing. Some people inside the admin don't want to deport them all, and when combined with business interests are able to push back against e-verify and let the hawks have some theater as a treat. And Trump's an entertainer, and 'sending ICE to Minneapolis' is made for TV in a way 'prevent illegal immigration with electronic forms' isn't.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
Yeah I do consider that lying but just as a factual matter most NYT articles don't do that. Some do! Most don't! I never claimed they never do that! But it seems to be quite difficult to report on facts that are of interest to politics without lying frequently, approximately nobody on any political side seems to do it well, and it's still useful to know the things the news reports despite that.
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
This is also just false as factual matter. Most normal journalists, including at the NYT, are writing articles like "Major US Public Transit Systems Brace For Storm With Detours And Warnings", and even the politics ones are mostly writing articles that are accurate.
curious_straight_ca
21d ago
If that video was the median Amelia meme I would've said something different!
curious_straight_ca
21d ago
I at least find your content more interesting than your style!
Nobody needs the opinion of a journalist; his job is to affirm the opinion of the consumer
Journalists are over-hated. They provide a valuable service of collecting, verifying, and disseminating raw facts like "white house staffer told me this EO is coming" or "this company is merging with that company". It's not as noble a profession as they think it is, and they are of course not perfect at it, but merely being passable at it while making frequent mistakes with significant bias is still very valuable.
Columbia represented both the philosophical principles of the American founding (I may disagree with many, but they are serious and substantial) as well as a concrete people civilizing the frontier and building what would become the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet. Amelia is a cute hot girl that represents no immigrants. Which is fine, but just not as substantial. Amelia is funny, and and accurately represents that the culture it comes from cares more about 'edgy memes' and 'looking at picture of attractive girls' than it does philosophical principles or material accomplishments. It's not that the former two are bad, they have their place, just... You can see this in the art, compare to this. I think Amelia's just a random internet meme of no unusual significance either positive or negative, but to the extent it really is "an abstract personification of your nation/culture/value system" what it says isn't good.
curious_straight_ca
21d ago
One could say that since humans evolved to conceal ovulation, so that males would have sex with females outside the females' fertile period, unprotected sex naturally serves both to make children and as as a way to signal that two people are mates. And then it seems plausible that sex with condoms, fellatio, etc could serve the same purpose.
More likely imo Trump wants to get away from the Epstein thing because they were buds in the past and that just looks bad, and he communicated that to his people in the usual Trump way, and there's lots of internal dysfunction and drama and poor communication in the Trump admin as there has been elsewhere, and you see the result. It's possible that actually Trump and Epstein did unspeakable things together on the island and he wants to cover that up, sure, but I think nothing looks different in those two scenarios.
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