DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
5mo ago
At a quick glance it seems like the constraints usually don't add anything interesting to the results. The glass transfer process is a fair bit of work but also too clean. Wood block printing adds an interesting texture.
However Kevork Mourad's work looks kind of neat to me.
https://www.artsy.net/artist/kevork-mourad https://www.kevorkmourad.com/portfolio/immortal-city-2018/
DradisPing
5mo ago
I'd disagree on both counts. Kamala Harris was cleverly picked by Biden because she was unpopular enough that party insiders couldn't try to force him to resign, while at the same time they can't block or force out the first black woman VP. Imagine if Spiro Agnew couldn't have been removed. Nixon would have finished his term.
Sarah Palin was viciously attacked because she was the only thing propping up McCain's lacklustre campaign and potentially blocking the first black president. If McCain had picked someone like Paul Ryan then Obama would have won by ten points.
If somehow the VP candidates are Gavin Newsom and Tim Scott I'd bet money against either Trump or Biden being president by 2026.
DradisPing
5mo ago
Asian food tends to have a big advantage in the west because they bring over relatives with or without working papers to work in their restaurants, while domestic cuisine expects their kitchen workers to have finished cullinary school.
The "best burger" thing is a little different. I think it goes back to Blue Tribe aversions to eating beef. Going to a restaurant to try a "fancy" burger is a loophole in the taboo.
DradisPing
5mo ago
Do Canada, Australia, and New Zealand even have an identifiable cuisine?
English Canada has always been extremely culturally interlinked with the US, so the only popular foods in Canada that didn't make it accross the border are from Quebec.
Australia / NZ have some local adjustments to the general Anglo cuisine. Prawns are a lot more common. Vegemite and Fairy Bread failed to become popular elsewhere. Emu and Kangaroo are more common.
British food in general is built around the idea that high quality cuts of meat can stand on their own. If you're spicing roast beef until you can't taste the beef, why are you paying for it?
Also British food has some presentation issues. Mince and tatties would be much more visually appealing if they just served it in a bowl with the potatoes on the bottom.
Voting for RFK Jr or minor candidates better conveys dissatisfaction. They won't win, but the major parties do pay attention to that vote. Typically they respond by making it harder to get on the ballot, but at least you've needled them.
Also it's easier to make a difference than you think. Most people do nothing. If you consistently do a weekly podcast complaining about specific things local politicians have done you'll probably get their attention.
Another thing is that you can take advantage of information asymmetry. If you print out 100 flyers and drop them off at houses along the street the politician lives on and where some of their sr staffers live they will assume it was a major city wide literature drop.
DradisPing
5mo ago
He was caught because he wasn't criminally sophisticated enough to know that the best way to receive bribes is underpriced investment opportunities.
Gold bars and envelopes of cash are seen as gauche.
Why he didn't just go on to be a lawyer is hard to know
It's hard to make money as a lawyer with a private practice. He built up his early career connections in politics instead of getting into the good graces of the local legal community, so he was basically shut out from the high paying jobs.
DradisPing
5mo ago
"Do the right thing" is a little too abstract.
I think "personal gain" or "ambition or pride" account for a lot of it, but in a nicer way than you're probably thinking.
People get into a position where running for office makes sense for them. They were involved in politics at a young age, they helped out on some campaigns or worked on the hill, then they find themselves living in an open seat while being sick of their jobs.
The other one is people who became political staffers because they were interested in politics, only to discover that the pay is terrible. So they wait for a redistricting and move into a winnable district without a clear incumbent.
There are people who want to be recognized a pillars of their community, and running for office is a way to get that recognition.
DradisPing
5mo ago
Eat a lot of protein then get on tren and other gear. Bodybuilders enjoy working out all the time.
DradisPing
5mo ago
Google was able to lose $2 billion a year on YouTube for over a decade. Additionally Google tweaks search results to favour YT over other platforms. Also it's integrated with Google's ad sales so any competitor needs to come up with an entire ad tech stack to compete.
Rumble is an alternative video hosting site but it's clearly behind YT tech wise. They are having success hosing rightish content that YT throttles to hell. Also they have two ongoing lawsuits against Alphabet for their business practices around YT.
It's very obvious that Rumble has to settle for a lower quality of advertiser.
DradisPing
5mo ago
I doubt we even have any good data to disprove or approve on whether segregation is good.
That's not really true, we just have so much data on schools. There have been many programs to mix school districts in cities over the past 60 years, so we have a lot of data. Plenty of recent data too, for instance NYC adjusted school boundaries and implemented race quotas in it's elite schools just a few years ago.
Relatedly I always wander if there is anything positive in the Florida school system which has very high Hispanic test scores.
A lot of Florida's hispanics are basically just Spanish speaking Europeans who lived in Cuba. James Franco got a lot of flack from hispanic actors for getting cast as Castro, but Castro had no non-European ancestry. In fact Castro's father and Franco's grandfather probably grew up less than 100 miles from each other.
Compare that to California which is getting a lot of Oaxaca natives these days who speak Spanish as a second language and are illiterate on prose literacy scores.
Red state back to basics education actually does very well at educating new arrivals. Texas does quite well once you control for ethnic makeup. Meanwhile the largest black - white disparity in student performance is in ultra blue Berkley. Teaching black students they can't ever succeed due to institutional racism is damaging.
DradisPing
5mo ago
The semiconductor factories can be seen as a point against invasion. They are very easy to destroy, either purposefully or accidentally.
It'd make sense for Taiwan to blow them up itself. Would China have the stomach for an extended occupation and suppression if they weren't getting any value out of it?
DradisPing
5mo ago
Sure, the DOJ wrote a memo suggesting it was a lawful act, but I don't see a good clear line between drone striking a citizen advocating the violent overthrow of the US Government and "assassinating a political rival."
In court the DOJ was arguing that presidential immunity applies whenever the DOJ says the action is legal. That seems a bit hard to square legally and constitutionally, but it does sound like exactly the standard the DOJ wants.
DradisPing
5mo ago
So as a bit of preamble, at the moment the left has partisan control of courts in NYC and DC at all levels until the SCOTUS. The appeals courts won't curb any abuses against Trump or Trump supporters. At the same time the left has been running campaigns to attack the SCOTUS as illegitimate and partisan to keep them in line and push for court stacking.
The theory behind broad presidential immunity is that without it any random prosecutor in the US could threaten the POTUS with prosecution after they leave office unless they do what the prosecutor wants. Official immunity isn't a new concept. Courts have given judges and prosecutors broad immunity already. Sr government employees generally only face internal disciplinary actions, and if they are charged they'll face a DC court with a jury made up of government employees.
Can prosecutors always find things to charge them with? Usually yes. There are a lot of broadly written laws that the government uses to go after people who are troublesome. They aren't applied broadly. You need to piss someone off and be enough of an outsider that they think it's safe to go after you.
The argument against broad immunity is usually that the appeals courts will quickly correct any misbehavior. Politically motivated charges are a civil rights act violation so surely the appeals courts will dismiss them quickly.
The appeals courts not doing anything neuters that argument.
So SCOTUS is upset. Correcting every error would get them salami sliced as Trump toadies. One broad ruling would prevent them from having to make dozens of smaller rulings.
DradisPing
5mo ago
Blue tribe has been playing down the election because they don't want to think about how the prosecutions are clearly part of the election strategy.
Seeing Biden out on the campaign trail while Trump is forced to be in a courtroom under gag orders would trigger some cognitive dissonance.
DradisPing
5mo ago
US culture is anti-aristocratic and egalitarian. UK culture still has a lot of class stratification.
So in the UK upper class people are expected to have posh accents and witty retorts. This is taught in school. Lower classes have things like cockney rhyming slang to make things difficult for outsiders.
In the US traditions of upper class verbal acuity are frowned upon. Politicians and people on TV are expected to speak in a more folksy manner.
Additionally supporting black voices is expected, so they have things like this national debate championship: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8
DradisPing
5mo ago
The James Damore incident was evidence of a culture problem. Google is no longer a place where an autist can openly name a problem.
People good at internal politics muscled their way into the Google AI projects. Everyone else is afraid to criticize them.
After spending megabucks there's internal pressure to launch. So the project goes live with glaring flaws.
DradisPing
5mo ago
Competence porn as mentioned in another post. But another part is they introduce interesting characters and locations without diving too deep or the author expecting you to get invested in them.
The Brits have a phrase, “overly personal” for getting too deep in someone else life story. Sometimes I want to enjoy a colorful cast without a therapeutic analysis.
DradisPing
5mo ago
I'm in Canada so that's not an option. Weed is just legal.
If I wanted to put in the effort my best bet would probably be one of the "anti aging" clinics that does treatments like HRT that aren't covered provincially. They can charge for appointments so there's more revenue generated by having me as a patient.
DradisPing
5mo ago
Most doctors are overqualified for the routine medicine that they often do. I'd expect that less competent doctors would just be given the routine cases like "man who needs his blood pressure medication prescription renewed" or "girl who's boyfriend got syphilis wants antibiotics".
A less competent doctor might be more willing to accept my "I need Adderall to get more done at work" line of thought.
DradisPing
6mo ago
I think you'd be a lot better off building a big plastic dome to keep moisture in and trucking in water tanks every so often.
DradisPing
6mo ago
Hippie organic farmers are squarely in the target RFK demo. Against big agriculture companies. Against onerous and arbitrary federal agriculture regulations.
One of the big shifts in politics during the Obama and Trump terms is that Democrats went from being suspicious of the CIA and FBI to seeing them as "Our Guys". Republican support has cratered.
RFK is targeting people who never got on board with trusting the intelligence community.
It's very interesting to look back at 90s entertainment. The three letter agencies are often portrayed as shady. Now they are generally only portrayed in an extremely positive light.
DradisPing
6mo ago
There was probably some official policy statement released by the Ministry Of Health or whoever's in charge of that in the UK. I'd guess that the politicians demanded that they either cancel it or provide detailed scientific information defending it.
DradisPing
6mo ago
The establishment Democrat messaging has been "we need to trust our foreign policy professionals" while Trump and Kennedy are both running more along the lines of "the State Department keeps fucking up and someone needs to yell at them". So it hurts Biden in that way.
It's more of a case of his supporters losing energy and enthusiasm instead of someone thinking of the issue and changing their vote.
DradisPing
6mo ago
I'm actually very interested in how SBF's personality and views will change after he's been off all of the stimulants for a while. I know that when he was in jail they knocked his Adderall dose from 40mg/day to 10mg/day and he went to court to demand more while he was on trial.
His legendary lack of empathy was probably at least partly a "too many amphetamines" problem.
Not really. It was more that the Judge and the plaintiffs refused to accept his financial statements and insisted he had secret money. It was a mix of hating Alex Jones and leftists needing to believe that Jones was a grifter in it for the money. Accepting that there wasn't much money would have damaged their world view.
The plaintiff's lawyers refused settle and now the plaintiffs won't get much of anything.
Infowars has creditors who have priority in the bankruptcy. The talent doesn't have exclusive contracts. The studio can only be sold for pennies on the dollar. Infowars generates no income if it's off the air.
Texas has fairly generous bankruptcy protections. Jones will get to keep his home, his retirement savings, and a vehicle for each adult in his home. He'll be able to start up a new video stream hauking supplements fairly easy. Production values will be lower at first.
Obviously it's a huge blow but it won't destroy him.
One of the reasons that the Judge needed to do a default judgement is that Jones isn't nearly as guilty as people think. People mentally lump him together with "Alex Jones types" but he wasn't the primary driver of the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. The defence was doing mock trials and found that some of the time they could win, even with an Austin jury.
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