blooblyblobl
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User ID: 232
blooblyblobl
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5d ago
blooblyblobl
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11d ago
The point of the argument in the footnote is to show that, once the "genetic engineering" boo lights are removed, everyone's revealed preferences favor the same outcome as the world in which we select embryos for higher intelligence, harmful comorbidities included (real or imagined). If people somehow think that rolling the dice with nature is less likely than embryo selection to unintentionally couple higher intelligence with undesirable traits, to the extent that it's preferable to accept "natural" outcomes orders of magnitude worse than their preferred outcome to mitigate the risks unique to embryo selection, they either have a dismally wrong understanding of embryo selection (which, reminder, is just rolling the dice a bunch and picking the best-looking result) or they're not reasoning consistently.
At its core, objecting to the reasoning of the geneticist with a shrug and an "I dunno man, sounds risky" isn't actually an argument about the risks (surely the geneticist has deeply considered them, and our objector is already on-record as lacking the qualifications to do so!) - it's an expression of distrust.
I suspect people's primary objection, regardless of whether they clearly understand and express it as such, has nothing to do with the long-term risk of embryo selection at a genetic level, and is instead based on the same obvious ethical and political concern for any eugenics proposal - that it will be applied unfairly by some groups to gain power over others. This includes geneticists and their employers miscalculating, misrepresenting, or lying about risks, evading liability for accidental harms or unsatisfactory outcomes, and charging enormous sums of money for extremely modest benefits; and rich parents granting their children an effortless comparative advantage over the majority of children whose parents don't (or can't) pony up to rig the game for themselves.
blooblyblobl
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15d ago
There's a speculative Twitter thread suggesting Polymarket is being distorted by a single huge better: https://x.com/Domahhhh/status/1846597997507092901
blooblyblobl
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18d ago
If you're just deploying to Windows machines, it's genuinely not hard to use newer .NET versions to produce that <10MB GUI binaries most of the time:
- If you know your deployment runtime (for .NET Desktop, win-x86, win-x64, or win-arm64), in modern versions of .NET you can just
dotnet publish -r <runtime>and it skips the default runtime bloat. Of course, you now have to deploy the right binary to your user, but this isn't hard in 2024 - Windows on ARM is basically a fantasy, W11 doesn't even have an x86 version any more, and W10 is going out of support next year (whether you like it or not - RIP). - You don't have to bundle the runtime with your application. For the minor annoyance of adding some extra code to your installer bundle to download and execute the runtime installer when the runtime is absent, you can convincingly gaslight your users into thinking your application is just the tiny binary, and the runtime library is just some weird Windows thing that came along for the ride. And this is basically what you had to do with Visual C++ Runtimes, so it's not like the users haven't been doing this for years...
I guess if you're optimizing for binary size, you're never gonna beat Microsoft bundling the .NET Framework binaries directly into every Windows distribution for you. But if you can, come join us in the future! I uplifted a .NET Framework 4.5 application to .NET 8.0 Desktop with about 10 lines of inconsequential code changes and some project file hackery, then attached new pieces to the project using abstract static interfaces and generic math only available in .NET 7 or greater, and added a few lines of code to a bundled installer to download the runtime from Microsoft. It all just works, it's about 20% faster on the critical path, my binary size went from 1MB to about 1.5MB, and it took me a day instead of a month to add the new feature I needed. It's great.
I won't claim there's no reason to use .NET Framework any more (particularly if you committed crimes against humanity with AppDomains), but the happy path for most new GUI development in C# targeting Windows should point you squarely at .NET Desktop on the most modern version of .NET LTS (the even-numbered ones). It's infinitely more tolerable than the other garbage desktop front-end frameworks excreted and subsequently rug-pulled a year or two later by Microsoft in the last few years (UWP, MAUI, WinUI x where {x ∈ N, x < ∞}), it's not a website and some WASM in a trenchcoat (Blazor, ElectronNET), and you still get all the WPF goodness (and WinForms, if you really want it).
blooblyblobl
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19d ago
Incidentally, you can use Electron.NET with .NET Core and get the "best" of both worlds. The .NET portion is tiny, but the electron portion is basically guaranteed to be over 100MB, full of front-end razor template/css hell, oodles of extra javascript to do all the things that aren't natively supported correctly, squeeze your entire UI update logic through a SignalR straw, and an infinite menagerie of implementation bugs and issues. But it'll run on just about anything, including a browser. And the ASP.NET side is pleasant to work with.
blooblyblobl
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1mo ago
For now...
CWD cases have rapidly expanded from a handful of states a few years ago to more than half of the US and most of Canada. Overpopulation, indirect contact transmission in deer, and durable environmental contamination are going to mix in a nasty way for the next few decades. Several states already have incidence rates in double digit percentages of the statewide deer populations.
And there's moderately compelling evidence of venison-to-human transmission.
Whether or not the venison-eating population is fine today, I personally don't like the odds, and it doesn't look better in 10 or 20 years. Even if transmissibility between deer and humans is poor, nobody knows for sure. I don't want to take the risk with a guaranteed-fatal deadly disease affecting single- or double-digit percentages of the North American deer population, that can't be reliably detected without a lab examination, for which the trigger is a protein that is stable below 1000°F and is unaffected by stomach acid.
blooblyblobl
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1mo ago
Tangential rebuttal to the idea that we should be eating the local wildlife: I'd like to not get prion diseases. This is admittedly more specific to deer, and I can get behind an "eat more rabbits from your backyard" proposal. But the prevalence of CWD, the difficulty of killing and butchering a deer without damaging and blood-mixing any part of the nervous system, and the fact that the harmful protein remains a stable environmental contaminant in the soil for years, compels me toward lower-risk culling of deer.
blooblyblobl
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1mo ago
The UAW is still going strong... Clearly someone has a use for low-skill, high priced, lazy, dishonest labor. Just maybe not the people required to hire them.
In any case, I think "lack of English language comprehension" is the real nail in the coffin. We can get away with Spanish since it's basically the unofficial second language of the USA, but I don't see too many government forms translated into Creole.
blooblyblobl
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2mo ago
The fiber I mentioned has been replaced with newer, higher-bandwidth stuff a couple times in the last 40 years. The key value proposition wasn't the fiber itself - it was laying a channel with enough access ports that anyone could run whatever they want through the run for the next hundred years. In this case, the power company paid for the fiber itself, then businesses paid for updates and replacements decades later, and it cost a fraction of what it would have to tear up all the streets and put in new channels everywhere. Like @FiveHourMarathon mentioned in the sibling post, leaving room for expansion and future updates is smart.
blooblyblobl
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2mo ago
Greenfielding new commercial construction? Absolutely, put it in now. Back in the 80s, a family member's residential construction business put in a fiber network for the power company in a front range city, and the one-time installation cost has paid for itself about a thousand times over, even allowing for updated runs and municipal gigabit fiber to the home in that neighborhood. Smart infrastructure investment is usually a good deal, even if it's pricey up front.
Just don't make me re-wire my entire panel box for solar/battery/EV deployment, when I have none of those things, just to finish my damn basement.
blooblyblobl
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2mo ago
At a county level, non-mandatory code compliance can once again become mandatory. My father runs (well, ran) a business remodeling homes in and around a city where such adjacency to reality is the default disposition, and the cost and time difference between projects in this county and projects in the neighboring farmland county would make your head spin. Pulling permits for just about anything is a nightmare, since the city takes this as an opportunity to force homeowners to update their properties for modern code compliance. We've had deck jobs where the city-mandated updates to insulation, electrical, etc ended up costing more than the damn deck.
The city council loves bragging about how they have some of the strictest and most complex building codes in the nation, because in their minds, it means they're doing the most in the fight against climate dragons. It somehow goes unmentioned that a lot of these initiatives are counterproductive or dangerous (mandated over-building electrical infrastructure for any job that touches an electrical installation encourages people to get creative with their own wiring jobs). A lot of the other mandates are clearly back-scratching graft for a captured industry - the insulation requirements are so ridiculously overprovisioned that in many cases the only way to meet the county requirements is with special sealant foam along every wall joist, which costs like $3/ft and is sold by one company in the state. Note that this can also be an add-on requirement by the county for anything that opens an exterior wall for any reason (including maintenance and repair). This all has exactly the expected effect on willingness to perform maintenance by local landlords, and large swaths of the city have properties full of dozens of trivial issues that get swept under the rug to avoid incurring massive update costs unrelated to basic maintenance. And of course, the dilapidated ghetto-houses in this city are worth double or triple the value of the neighboring county's much-nicer modern homes, contributing another unironic brag by the city council.
During the pandemic, out of an "abundance of caution" the city council decided to shut down the building and planning department - offices closed, phones off, no one responded to emails - and moved all the permitting forms online. The online form was totally broken, of course, and auto-rejected all applications. For 18 months, you simply could not pull a permit in the county. Homeowners were understandably upset with this state of affairs, and eventually ignored the permits and moved ahead with their projects. As long as we follow code, and get engineering approval for anything that needs it, the only thing missing is the formality of a city stamp on your piece of paper, and they're not supposed to arbitrarily reject you if you're doing everything right, so... Of course, the instant the city comes back from their 18-month paid sabbatical, they immediately start suing every homeowner who did unpermitted work, starting, of course, with the people who live in viewing distance of the city council members! The city council got a reality check at the state court level, but not before wasting millions of dollars attempting to punish their own citizens for a problem they created.
Most of the city council secured re-election.
My dad has since left the state.
blooblyblobl
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3mo ago
I knew before I previewed the link that this would be the ciechanowski animation, and I'm here to express my extreme delight with everything on that site. The GPS animations are also stand-out spectacular. One of the few people on the internet doing interesting things with the new WASM toys.
blooblyblobl
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3mo ago
Maybe! I like to forget which is which. It makes for some funny threads.
blooblyblobl
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3mo ago
I met a call for indiscriminate mass murder with a self-regulating incentive system that simultaneously brings out the best in people, offers a second chance to those truly down on their luck, and condones the death of the undeserving - I'd hardly call that "unbounded sympathy".
On a serious note, I totally agree that there has to be a limit to society's generosity for recalcitrant insanity and unrepentant antisocial behaviors. I also think that, as far as solutions, "kill them and everyone that roughly matches that description" is a lazy edgelord hot take; the ridiculous cost of food and shelter lately is probably responsible for a considerable fraction of the "roughly matches that description" class; and there's an important distinction between criminal and personal nuisances.
Bailey Not-Castle: let's make homelessness punishable by death!
Motte Castle: let's kill everyone on the "individuals known to authority" list, as they commit the Pareto majority of homeless nuisances.
I won't poke too much more fun at this, since I did literally ask for it, and clearly connecting punishment to crimes instead of statuses is a promising step forward.
blooblyblobl
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3mo ago
I can at least respect this position. Taxpayers and charities have handed lots of money and time to various entities to fix the problem, and they have a nasty habit of either making the problem worse, or running up a huge bill to sit around and pontificate on the problem. The police are neutered, incompetent, apathetic, or incapable of dealing with the problem, often by the demands and threats of a tiny slice of the activist class. And the homelessness problem has visibly gotten terrible! I live somewhere where I've seen firsthand how bad things have gotten. I can understand why people are eventually going to reach for vigilantism or mob rule when every function in society designed to protect against these problems has failed or turned traitor to wage class warfare.
And if we reach the point where our leaders, police, activists, and technocrats really can't fix the homelessness problem, and the only solution really feels like mass murder... indiscriminately taking out our collective anger on the mentally ill, addicted, and financially unlucky, is missing the forest for the trees, no?
blooblyblobl
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3mo ago
Oops, thanks.
blooblyblobl
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3mo ago
A modest proposal, then?
At the risk of taking the bait, and against my better judgment... This is a hideously lazy solution for a society that has moved beyond sustenance farming. You're making a cynical presumption of intentional apathy to justify unreasonable measures, when in reality, there but for the grace of God do you go. In a society where your friends and family reflect your attitude, you're one TBI away from being labeled an inconvenience and put to death. Without a hint of introspection or irony, you condemn the homeless because your tiny slice of the collective burden of housing them is too costly and inconvenient for you? Have we considered, perhaps, making the burden less burdensome? Maybe eliminating legislative barriers to affordable housing erected by the economically privileged would be a better place to start than getting out your guns and going postal on a tent city? As it stands, you want society to grant you a license to kill those who inconvenience you - and this is exactly the sort of small-minded, impulsive criminality that society is constructed to curtail.
While we're unseriously venting our spleens, here's a modest counter-proposal: you can have your license to kill the homeless, but you only get to kill as many people as for whom you voluntarily provide housing, and if you ever stop providing that housing for any reason, and anyone you housed is killed by this policy, you too are put to death. This is at least marginally less lazy than your proposal, because it forces you to exercise discriminating judgment as to who is worth helping and who is a lost cause, and it guarantees that you can't take someone in for a day just to execute them the following day. You get to slake your bloodthirst and prove that you aren't just a lazy sociopath who wants society to give you a free pass for murder; I get you to rehabilitate or hospice someone who doesn't deserve to die, because your skin is in the game; some people get a better life than they currently have; and we get to eliminate the truly hopeless cases. And if no one agrees to house someone for their license to kill, we're no worse-off than we started.
I'd personally prefer if we don't openly advocate for killing groups of people over inconveniences and unproductivity, but if we must, let's at least try to address the obvious, foreseeable objections to our modest proposals with our own well-reasoned conclusions, and not just show our whole ass to the world?
blooblyblobl
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3mo ago
Hey now, there's definitely a third option.
If I were Biden, I'd keep an eye out for stray banana peels.
blooblyblobl
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3mo ago
I realize now that I should have been saying de facto legalize. Yes, bribery is still illegal, and it can still be prosecuted, but it's very hard to go anywhere with that prosecution if the President can declare the initial act of discussing a bribe as part of his authority to seek opinions from his officers, thus rendering it subject to simple absolute immunity, and preclude the court from considering it (including for the briber, for what it's worth). Barrett's objection concerns the quid-pro-quo evidence created by the President after agreeing to a bribe; my concern is with the impossibility of demonstrating the President's (or his briber's) mental state, a necessary prerequisite for a bribery prosecution, when the court is explicitly disallowed to consider it.
The constitution clearly delineates between "Law" and "Impeachment", and the two are unrelated. I see the word "nevertheless" here meaning "this clause is about impeachment, not about the method of criminally prosecuting the president in spite of their absolute immunity", rather than "but if you remove them from office, you can now also do this other stuff".
I could be wrong, and if so I think you make a compelling argument for what right looks like.
Edit: See The_Nybbler's point here.
blooblyblobl
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3mo ago
But again, this does nothing. There's no declarative requirement for the President to e.g. invoke executive privilege. The President has absolute immunity for seeking opinions from his officers, it's not something he has to argue, he just says he was seeking an opinion and that's the end of the discussion; you can't subpoena parties or submit records of the conversation as evidence, and without that, you have no evidence of bribery. And as far as I can tell, impeachment (even after leaving office, which is out on a limb at best) doesn't strip absolute immunity. There is no legal battle, because the required evidence to prove a crime or any circumstances under which immunity wouldn't apply, impeachment or otherwise, cannot be considered by the court.
The outcome of an impeachment is, at worst, removal from office. Nothing about impeachment appears to grant anyone authority to strip absolute immunity conferred to actions taken pursuant to constitutionally granted powers of the President while the President was President.
ETA:
Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.
I'd read that as allowing subsequent prosecution, but not somehow removing absolute immunity from actions taken while still the President. If not, you could plausibly impeach and try every president immediately after they leave office, or whenever an opposing party gets a majority in the Senate, for crimes even intended to be obviated by the president's official powers. In which case, why grant immunity at all?
blooblyblobl
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4mo ago
what's stopping the next president from ordering the DOJ to prosecute and investigate?
Nothing, they just can't build a case if it depends on evidence precluded by simple absolute immunity.
What's stopping Congress from issuing a subpoena and hauling the last guy in?
The aforementioned simple absolute immunity.
What's stopping a federal prosecutor from opening a case and bringing charges?
Aside from bribery cases being guaranteed to fail in the absence of evidence of mental state, nothing.
For bribery specifically, you must prove the President's mental state of knowingly taking a bribe. The majority ruling explicitly forbids the courts from considering the President's mental state when determining if actions taken under the powers granted by the constitution are improper. And the president talking to his executive officers is explicitly a power granted by the constitution. So if the President says he wasn't taking a bribe, he was just talking with his officers... End of story, this crime cannot be prosecuted because evidence to the contrary is subject to absolute immunity, and is required for conviction.
What good does it do to prosecute a case if, by definition, you are guaranteed to fail?
I'm looking through the second link... The 1500 number isn't mentioned anywhere (they say "thousands") and there's nothing in the article that suggests registrations or requests for mail-in ballots are in any way fraudulent (besides the high volume from a single delivery).
Am I missing something? Did the article change to omit or modify this information between when you posted and when I read it? Are you thinking of some other story?
Also, MSN is cancerous, here's a slightly less gnarly link with the same article from fox43 (your first article source).
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