TIRM
6hr ago
In the novel Diamond Age nanotechnology allows for any consumer good to be created almost for free. Free for the end user if they accept integrated advertisements playing on their stuff. So the wealthy wear natural fiber clothes handmade by tailors and write on 19th century style paper pressed by an artisanal paper maker, etc. If sheets of pure diamond were almost free due to diamonds' simple repeating atomic structure, then the wealthy would only have genuine glass unlike the poors.
TIRM
6hr ago
The techs at my work like overtime and complain on public chat channels about the unfair favoritism that lets some of them get more overtime than others.
TIRM
7hr ago
Gulf States also do it. By American standards they are quite cruel to these workers. We lack the stomach for it.
TIRM
7hr ago
"We wanted workers. We got people instead."
Comment about a """temporary""" guest worker program in the 1960s in which the temporary non-European workers tended to stay forever.
TIRM
7hr ago
Not to negate the premise, but I neither own a TV nor have ever used any food delivery service. I also used Uber Eats years ago when on a business trip. Instead my coworker and I walked a couple very cold miles to a pub. We made the right choice.
According to my grandfather food was good in the 50s, reached a real low point around the 70s and has improved since then. One man's opinion. But, "food in the 50s was bad" is not obviously true. Especially for our hypothetical very rich person.
TIRM
7hr ago
To be perhaps excessively fair to Trump:
In 2024 Speaker Johnson met Biden and asked about an executive order pausing new natural gas permits that Biden signed a few days previously. The response was horrifying:
Biden reportedly denied having issued such an order, saying "I didn't do that". Johnson pressed the issue, describing the economic and national security damage the pause was causing.
Johnson told the Free Press' Bari Weiss that he did not believe Biden was lying, but rather "genuinely didn't know what he had signed". Johnson left the meeting with "fear and loathing," questioning who was truly in charge of the country.
Who the fuck signed that executive order if not the executive? Some anonymous staffer set LNG export policy without Biden's approval or awareness?
The use of the autopen itself is not actually concerning They've been in common use by US presidents for centuries. Biden not being aware of executive orders he supposedly recently signed is very concerning and I'm fine with Trump issuing a contrary executive order.
Having read Trump's announcement: he doesn't specify pardons. I hope he won't try to reverse pardons and he'd fail anyways.
both my grandmothers had blue eyes. So I know my parents were both carriers for blue eyes
both my grandmothers had blue eyes. So I know my parents were both carriers for blue eyes.
Maybe. Kind of. There are recessive brown eyed genes. Two blue eyed parents can possibly have brown eyed children. The examples of Mendelian genetics used in high school tend to be extremely oversimplified. They really shouldn't use these examples without a huge warning that any practical application on humans may defy what you were taught. Reality tends to be very polygenic with a lot of codominance unlike the Punnett squares we learned in school. When we learned Punnett squares in middle school in the 90s, our teacher warned us this is a huge oversimplification that only works for carefully selected traits like pea plant stalk shape and not common traits in humans.
I buy raw Korean meat from Korean markets. Bulgolgi and short ribs mostly. I'm paying for the butcher to cut and marinate it for me. I own a Korean barbecue grill. It is a big round metal plate you place over a camp stove.
I tried making my own bulgolgi marinade using jarred marinade from a Korean market. It was noticeably worse than the Korean butcher. So I just buy the pre-marinated meats.
I'm white and my wife is Chinese. We just like Korean food.
TIRM
7d ago
Interestingly the US has committed to canceling these people in a very literal sense if the ICC actually captures a member of the US military or an ally. See the "Hague Invasion Act" for details.
So there's pros and cons for the current situation. Con: this guy can't easily book hotel rooms or use payment processors. "If you don't like it, just build your own global financial system" type of being canceled. Pro: Seal Team Six is not currently kicking down this guy's door and giving him the just wages of his actions. Which is possible if he somehow gets a US ally in a ICC cell.
The US and Israel are not signatories of the Rome Statute. We need to, in the strongest way possible, repudiate the imagined authority of the ICC. This is an attempt to imprison a democratically elected head of state. The ICC is a rogue organization and needs to be treated as such.
TIRM
7d ago
a full sale of the EU operations to an entity which will be EU based and therefore comply with the Eurocrats.
This will give the EU ready made versions of their own services
I don't think so. They aren't handing the tech over. EU can kick them out but not make them sell their tech. If there's any possible way for the US to block them from selling off their tech, I would support that.
TIRM
7d ago
I was using my wife's old phone signed into the Chinese Apple app store with Chinese WeChat installed. They have Chinese-only versions of apps for only people with Chinese mainland phone numbers and bank accounts. It was effortless. I clicked through a few screens of taking photos and entering info and I was done. A verified foreigner ready to buy a bun from a street vendor with Wechat pay. I'm not sure if the American version of WeChat is as functional.
Many years ago a Chinese immigrant coworker got locked out of WeChat. I tried to helped them get back on by them scanning a QR code from my account. The point being a user in good standing who is physically in front of a person can verify them. WeChat wrongly implied this would unlock their account. It ultimately did not. They couldn't get on as Chinese person recently immigrated to America. Somehow flagged as a fake account. But inexplicably I, an American who worked a bit in China long ago, was let into the system. Something about anarcho-tyranny applies.
TIRM
8d ago
I did similarly this past summer. Wechat let me validate my identity with a selfie and a photo of my US passport.
Incidentally the Motte is accessible in China and I posted from there without VPN. I did not even have a VPN on the phone I brought.
TIRM
8d ago
force the American companies to lift these sanctions
These companies are much more beholden to Secretary Rubio than to Eurocrats. These are Americans in America. Violating official sanctions is not an option. Million dollar penalties and federal imprisonment are the possible punishments for purposefully violating sanctions.
Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
TIRM
9d ago
And you think this is the strongest or most representative ask from women wanting to participate in politics: drinking at the pub with the boys? Not voting or participating in discussion that is separate from hanging out at the pub?
TIRM
9d ago
Long ago some people on 4chan trawled mug shots and screencapped examples of clearly not white people wrongly recorded as white. Not a rigorous statistical analysis, but examples abound if you look for them.
TIRM
10d ago
There's a time window for money and property transfers that count. Typically 2 years. Transfer, wait 2 years or more depending on jurisdiction, declare bankruptcy.
I am pointing out the level of cherrypicking it takes to select a very narrow policy each from a separate country and compare each in isolation to the US. Especially when those countries would underperform each other by almost all these metrics; the North Korean border policy not making it better than the US or Germany at employment law.
And that's not even getting into if these policies are even desirable. North Korea out competing us at extreme insularity. China executing people for all sorts of reasons I don't agree with; including the popular act of getting currency out of China. They sure are "better at" executing people for things that are not crimes in the US or other developed countries. Something North Korea is also much better at than us. Singapore enacting racial housing quotas. They certainly are more extreme by those measures. Not that I'd say they are "better at" setting policy for some of these examples.
TIRM
11d ago
How many examples would you regard as sufficient?
A list of cherrypicked examples beats the typical experience. For the US and almost all other countries for each carefully picked example. On one hand yes, that's how cherrypicked examples work, but it is not impactful or relevant. I'm not learning much about the inadequacies of America in our underperforming relative to North Korean insularity.
TIRM
11d ago
I know multiple people who got hospital bills sent to collections. Always the same story: they never got the bill and were certain they paid all they owed and got a nasty surprise of collections coming after them for more. I don't suppose that's good for your credit score, if that eventually happens to you.
TIRM
14d ago
That would be after collecting monthly payments for a long time. Turning a profit in aggregate for a large pool of lenders.
Yes Biden's pardons were ridiculous. Mass pardoning and clemency to thousands of people including murderers and child abusers. But that's the president's power not subject to second guessing by courts or future presidents. If Trump goes after Biden's pardons then courts will stop him.
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