JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
16d ago
There's actually a precedent to that - Ukrainian SSR and Belorussian SSR used to have its own seat at UN, along the USSR seat. So USSR essentially held three seats, despite the SSRs being much less independent than US states. USSR wanted all 15 SSRs in but the US said if they do that, then they get 48 US states as members. So they bargained and since USSR had pretty strong position they agreed on every nominally independent state being in, despite being de-facto dependent (e.g. Philippines at the time) and even British India being in, but USSR gets three seats.
JarJarJedi
16d ago
I'm sure they'd try that but I hope somebody there is still sane enough to realize a violent coordinated movement of this size which is controlled by somebody other than the government is kinda problem for them. Before it's too late.
JarJarJedi
16d ago
She was likeable, i.e. she didn't have the Hilary Clinton problem of coming off as a bitch. She didn't have any major skeletons in her closet. She had a good resume.
Wow do we watch two different movies. This is a woman who literally started her career through bedding a prominent powerful politician, and performed horribly - by the standards of her own party, which thoroughly criticized her for it when it were still allowed - once she was gifted a position. Who famously jailed parent of sick kids and proudly bragged about it. Who was explicitly and knowingly hired for her demographics and confirmed her ineptness by being unable to achieve literally anything for 4 years. Seriously, I haven't seen any proper answer to the question what she achieved that does not reduce either to demographics or to "she was around when a thing happened". Maybe the skeletons thing is true in a meaning that everybody knew how bad she was, but calling it "good resume" - my goodness. She is on record as the most extremist person in the Senate - and that's not for the lack of competition. And you personally may think about her as charming but it doesn't look like many people who vote agree with you on that...
JarJarJedi
16d ago
People weren't writing articles about Harris's likeability problems.
First of all, they didn't have time. She has been a candidate for about 100 days, and all of those were campaign days where serious objective scrutiny is not welcome at all. Second, writing an article like "experts suspect the ocean is wet" is also not going to make big waves. Read what people spoke of her before she was elevated, and you'll see plenty critique of her likeability.
JarJarJedi
16d ago
Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?
Now they do :) I mean, he won the popular vote, isn't it the ultimate approval rating?
JarJarJedi
16d ago
The other difference is before it could be - and usually were - dismissed as random one-off event, that just happened to be against Jews, but does not represent any systemic problem. This event is much bigger and very hard to dismiss as an "action of a lone-wolf crazed individual" - it's clear there is a strong, massive, violent anti-Semitic movement in Europe, and it's ready to roll out Kristallnachts on demand. They will try to dismiss it anyway, but I think they are starting to realize how big of a problem they have got, and that's it is not a Jewish problem but their problem.
JarJarJedi
16d ago
I know totally normal women who are saying nobody should have sex with men anymore
The definitions of "totally normal" are getting stretched really wide nowadays.
JarJarJedi
16d ago
I'm sorry and it must hurt, but I don't see how it is possible to maintain a long-term relationship and hide who you are. You can disagree, and have different opinions on certain matters, and I've heard about couples with different political views making it work (though it's probably not easy) but if you have to hide and live in mortal fear it comes out one day - it's not sustainable, and it's not the way to live your life.
JarJarJedi
17d ago
Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.
No she was not. She was a horrible candidate. She was universally unlikeable - which has been demonstrated many times before when she tried to get elected. She had no consistent message and vacillated between "All Biden did is also mine" and "I'm going to fix everything" - which looked completely fake. In fact, almost everything about her looked completely fake - from her demeanor to her positions to her personal history. She was unable to coherently speak on policy like politician, and she was unable to speak like a human being to other human beings. She did not attract any audience except one that would vote for an open can of surströmming if it had "D" written on it, and turned away many audiences who traditionally were Dem's strongholds. She pandered hard but it didn't work. She played "I was born in a middle class family" but nobody bought it. She made both workers and billionaires hate her. She got both Jews and Muslims endorsing the other candidate. She went all in on the Hitler thing when it should be obvious it doesn't work anymore. She was a crappy candidate who ran a weak campaign. The Party Machine is powerful, and it held what it could, and provided the money, the resources and the bodies, but turns out the Machine alone can not win, at least not yet. Our Democracy (TM) is not in a self-driving autonomous mode yet. It still needs a popular person at the helm to drive it. And Democrats chose very poorly.
I would argue they chose very poorly when they didn't oust Biden in 2023, but instead waited to the very last days and then were doomed to nominate Harris. If they did the smart thing, they could field a convincing candidate, and a convincing candidate plus the Party Machine could trounce Trump. I am so glad they did what they did instead. I am also so glad they do not seem to understand what happened to them. I wish them many happy returns.
JarJarJedi
17d ago
Admittedly, the subway surfing in question looks pretty lit.
Of course, the media, having gotten the whiff of somebody doing something incredibly stupid and dangerous, does the obvious thing - tries to make it look cool to as many people as possible so that they would be inspired to do the same, while pretending to moralize about it. It's impossible to hate them enough.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
Sanders is wrong about a lot of things, but he's not wrong about this: the Left used to be the movement of the working class, or at least aligned with the working class and paying attention to it. Now it mostly moved on to luxury beliefs. I can't believe for a steel mill worker or a tradesman the priority issues would be transgender rights, getting more migrants in and ensuring everybody drives an electric car.
JarJarJedi
18d ago
You know what, I for one am missing the Democrats that just want to expand social welfare programs and raise taxes. I mean, no open borders and putting thousands of migrants into hotels on taxpayer cost, no ban on combustion cars, no government censorship of speech, no taking kids from parents to change their gender, no males in woman sports, no pro-Hamas riots, no banning Jews from campuses, no camps for people who don't vaccinate, no DEI commissariat at every major institution, no calling me Nazi every time I disagree with them? I don't say I would agree with them, but that's certainly something I'd rather have in the opposing party. We could actually have an argument and see whether voters like more taxes in exchange for more services or not, and whatever would be the result, we could keep some respect for each other once we're done. Right now, it's like "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills".
JarJarJedi
20d ago
I don't think with Obama ("I have my pen and my phone") or Trump (who was supposed to overthrow democracy in 2016 but got too distracted by tweeting and forgot) there was a question about at least intent for the President to rule. Of course, no ruler is absolute - even kings and pharaohs learned that their power is not infinite if they pushed the limits - but at least they were trying to rule. With Biden, there's no plausible way he could.
JarJarJedi
21d ago
I was genuinely curious, not because I'm interested in going full vegetarian, but because I thought it's an interesting thing to try. But I didn't like the taste at all, so I gave up on the thing.
JarJarJedi
21d ago
But how do they decide who's on top? What if CIA wants one thing and State Dep another and chief of staff another?
JarJarJedi
21d ago
Kinda big-scale question, but it's not exactly culture war and the other threads fit it even less I think so I'll ask here. Something that has been bothering me for a while is this question: who is managing the federal government right now? I mean, US is the presidential republic. So, theoretically, the President is the person who is supposed to define policy and manage affairs, at least as far as executive branch of government - which is by now enormous - is concerned. The proverbial buck, as they say, starts and stops with him, at least that's the theory.
However, I think it is completely laughable to consider the idea that the person who is nominally the President now is capable of anything like that. Moreover, I can't really know but I have a strong suspicion this is the state of affairs for at least a couple of years by now. In that timeframe, certain decisions have been made and certain policies are being followed, etc. etc. - so some kind of governing is happening. Who is doing it? Is it Jill Biden? Is it some kind of collective like the Politburo in the USSR? Is it just each department of the government doing its own thing and minding its own as it sees fit? Who is the real President or Presidents?
JarJarJedi
21d ago
Where I live, I have no idea what ideologically most of people are, though since it is quite red area, I have my suspicions, but I don't know about each person specifically.
Ideally, I do not mind living around people who disagree with me on ideology, provided the disagreement is not too far. If somebody thinks we need to raise taxes and spend the money on public works projects like building a park, maybe I disagree but I'm fine living with them around me. If somebody thinks enforcing laws is racist and we should cut the police budget and use the money to distribute free drugs to drug addicts and perform gender transitions to kindergarten children - I'd rather live in a place far, far away from that person. It probably will be hard for me to draw the line per policy, but usually such things come in a package, and having lived with the results of applying that package to day-to-day life, I'd rather not go through that again.
JarJarJedi
21d ago
I almost never hit a problem that I can't diagnose fairly quickly
There can be only two reasons for that, based on my experience: either you are an extreme, generational quality genius, proper Einstein of bug triage, or you've just got lucky so far. In the former case, good for you, but again, that works only as long as the number of problems to diagnose is substantially less than one person can handle. Even if you take 1 minute to diagnose any problem, no matter how hard it is, there's still only 1440 minutes in a day, and I presume you have to also eat, sleep and go to the can. Consequently, this means a bigger system will have to fall into hands of persons who, unlike you, aren't Einsteins. And if the system is built in a way that it requires Einstein to handle it, the system is now under catastrophic risk. It could be that the system you're dealing right now is not the kind of system where you ever foresee any problem that you couldn't handle in a minute. That's fine - in that case, keep doing what you're doing, it works for you, no reason to change. I am just reminding that not all systems are like that, and I have worked many times with system that would be completely impossible to handle with the "lone genius" mode. They are, in fact, quite common.
JarJarJedi
21d ago
The first one has no text and is an assembly of half-second clips with rapid cuts, can you make any sense out of it? Like, figure out what is the bank's name and what happened to it?
The second one at least gives the name of the company Automated Bank Services, and the source of their reporting: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/credit-card-transaction-company-says-mornings-payment-problems-caused-by-attack/
So yes, it looks like they could indeed mess up with Israel's credit card processing provider (not a bank), blocking it for about 3 hours. Looks like a banal DOS, for which they had no protection for some reason.
JarJarJedi
21d ago
They are easier to reason about up to a point. Which a typical HFT trading setup will probably never cross, but a lot of other companies frequently do.
JarJarJedi
22d ago
recently republished by those antisemites over at Haaretz
You are saying it as if it were preposterous, but yes, Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken has a long history of hating IDF, wide sectors of Israel society (basically anybody outside far left), supporting BDS and Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists. He personally called Israel an "apartheid regime" and Hamas "freedom fighters" as recently as this year, so he may not be the most objective party here and certainly not one that being mentioned in the context of criticizing Israel reinforces the critique. I'm not sure if he qualifies as an "antisemite" - maybe yes, maybe not - but he would certainly support and endorse any libel and any fabrication that makes Israel look bad. It's basically not just "dog bites man", but "dog that is known for bitting men and having bitten men today, bites man again".
JarJarJedi
22d ago
OK maybe never is going too far. I'm not saying one-man band can't compete necessarily. In some cases, with the man being particularly awesome, it can happen in a particular place at a particular time. But scaling this to a company of hundreds of people would be absolutely impossible, because one person can not communicate effectively with hundreds, it's just physically not possible. One person or small number of persons can not be the bottleneck. And super-clever solutions would necessarily make them the bottleneck. It's either one-man band (maybe with a limited cast of janitorial staff) or a scalable corporation, but not both. And for some niches, being small is fine, but most businesses want to grow. And, very frequently, those who do grow eat up those who don't.
JarJarJedi
22d ago
Yeah that's another aspect. When you graduate from "one man band" to development team, and from development team to 20 teams each of them doing their own thing and needing to coordinate and figure out how not to step on each other toes, turns out hyper-smart CPU-optimal solutions are very rarely the best ones. You need common languages and solutions that can be made reusable and portable. Otherwise the undomitable volition solution needs to be thrown out and redone, because however good is whoever wrote it, he is not very scalable. There were times where lone heroes could single-handedly win battles, by their sheer will and awesomeness, and it's very romantic. But modern battles are never won that way.
JarJarJedi
22d ago
They don't actually, they pretend he is to make the attacks on him justifiable. They know perfectly well he's not a threat to them, I haven't heard a single case where a leftist would hate Trump but has been afraid to reveal it out of fear of violence from his side. I have multiple cases known where people displayed absolutely grotesque examples of hate towards Trump, without any fear of retaliation. Which is completely justified, because no retaliation by Trump ever happened. Worst he did is to call people insulting names and rant about them on Twitter or Truth Social.
Is this the same Nate Silver, the mighty predictor? Or somebody impersonating him? https://x.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1855215191102750879/photo/1
More seriously, though, I just can't understand any meaningful way in which you can accurately predict Trump winning 312 electoral votes and then accurately predict his chances of winning the electoral college is a coin toss. These don't seem to be compatible in any sensible way. Maybe you can invent some statistical trick to make it sound good but on the plain common sense meaning it just makes zero sense.
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