SlowBoy
1mo ago
I totally forget my chain of evidence now, but I remember once seeing compelling proof that this isn't really true and is just a fun myth. Maybe it's because Trump ran for president several times before, maybe it was some leak from some insider who said it didn't make a difference. I guess it basically doesn't matter because the story that Trump ran to get back at Obama is so good that everyone in the future will believe it.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
where at least the candidates had the decency to act embarrassed at being shown to be corrupt
Hillary? Bill? Pelosi? Cheney? Obama's IRS investigated conservatives and smuggled guns and spied and I'm still hearing about how he was so pristine that he had to suffer attacks about a tan suit.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
I'm honestly not sure how to feel about a guy who made his money largely thanks to government regulations and contracts getting heavily involved in politics.
All government contractors are run like this. This is the entirety of the economy of Washington DC, which is surrounded by 8 of the 20 wealthiest counties in the country. The entire industry is an elaborate defense mechanism against government and contractors sucking their own dicks being seen as corrupt. Occasionally, incidentally, some technical work gets done.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
It's possible that the criteria are jiggered to be greater than actually required
It happens quite often in government contracting that the contracts are designed for a particular bidder. Starlink might have the cheapest rural broadband, but are their curtains the right shade of purple? Then the primary contractor who wins sublets the work out to whoever really had the best bid.
One company I worked for told me that my job would be very safe with them, because the owner was Puerto Rican and so we always "got primary" for being minority-owned. Another company I worked for was very happy when they got rejected for a contract but told their bid was the best -- great progress!
SlowBoy
1mo ago
e my reply to @gattsuru), statistics which are in some sense 'constructed' are the only way of understanding any large scale and complex societal phenomena, whether it be crime, inflation or whatever el
I'm not suggesting that all statistics everywhere are bad. I'm saying that these statistics, collected by these people, in present America, are bad, and unreliable, as evidenced by the observation that anyone relying on them just a few weeks ago would have completely different conclusions as to etc. etc.
You want to have some sort of tough guy online moment where you call me a coward for not wasting my time parsing through obvious statistical bullshit of the highest order. Silly goose
SlowBoy
1mo ago
The procedures are arbitrary and usually hand large amounts of discretion to workers who are trying to parse complicated realities. If it wasn't complicated, we wouldn't see these wild swings in the data. You'd just count up everything and run some averages.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
"Bureaucratic" doesn't mean consistent and stable, it means arbitrary and unimaginative. You need to calculate how much inflation went up last year. The price of a Honda Civic went up $1000. The price of a Chevy went up $2000. Are those cars in the same categories, or different categories? Do we average them? Then it turns out that although the Civic went up $1000, they added new airbags that promise to save lives. How much is that worth? Let's make up a number. The cost went up by X but the value went up by Y so really that price increase doesn't represent $1,500 of inflation but etc. etc. etc. The economy is endlessly complex, and the measures aren't. So they're very somewhat arbitrary. It's drawing in freehand.
It's not even about, say, a conspiracy to make the numbers look good for someone or some purpose. (Although that happens: Boss wants evidence that raising interest rates is good so let's give it to him. I remember this famously happening in how CBO came up with estimates for Obamacare's impact on the federal deficit.) But it's not really a conspiracy. It's garbage in garbage out. You would expect this to fall apart for complicated situations, such as what we have right now: the economy is great for some Americans and terrible for others.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
I remember other discussions on this forum. Inflation and unemployment data. Long arguments about not trusting the economic data. This is why. These figures are totally arbitrary. There is no neutral competent adults-in-the-room authority anymore. Everything is this bad.
I have a friend who used to work at the Fed. He says to the extent that the figures weren't made up, they hsve basically no basis to reality. The numbers they report just reflect the process of the people creating them, which is bureaucratic and dull.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
I have a friend who made $750 for the last two weeks. He's not followed by Elon.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
He's clearly one of the greatest of the WORLD
Right, but Americans are already the greatest in the world, it goes without saying.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
That's a sophisticated, effective argument that would appeal to moderates.
They cheated! This kind of "sophisticated" klaptrap is a losing argument, because it's not earnest, it's not real. You can't honestly believe that they cheated (that's declasse, that's gauche), it's naive to really believe something so simple, so let's make up this complicated elaboration so that there's ironic distance to keep us all healthy and detached. They didn't cheat, they just changed the rules in unaccountable and unprecedent ways that felt like cheating, but technically I'm not calling it cheating because I don't want to cast aspersions about the process, which I'm casting aspersions about, but in a "sophisticated" way (insert crying seethejak under a happy mask).
If they stole the election from Trump, and Trump didn't say they cheated, but made some "sophisticated" complicated argument full of triangulationg, people would be pissed! They would have lost all faith in Trump. He wouldn't have just lost a few "winnable Senate and Gubernatorial races," he would have been exiled from the party. The GOP would have learned that Trump has no teeth, and they would have felt happy screwing him out of a third nomination.
Meanwhile Trump has learned the lessons from 2020 -- there are huge Republican orgs now dedicated to training poll watchers and lawyers undoing the rule changes and votes. Trump actually knows a thing or two about this.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Losing big is a part of winning big. Tom Brady lost at the Superbowl quite a few times, does that make him a loser? I think it's small-souled to look at a streak of big wins and cynically posture about failures and risk. Trump lost and then he kept fighting, which is the most important quality, which is that nice TV cliche that everybody talks about and no one really believes. His bankruptcies (large) set the stage for even greater success. That's the price of the game. But you just come down the escalator and fight and win and it's easy. And then you win some more. That's the attitude it takes to to imagine making America Greater Than Ever Before. It's the progressive forward-minded happy warrior (joy) that can imagine not just winning but winning more than anyone has ever thought possible. It's a big boast, it's uncouth and earnest and ridiculous. And it's the only way to really believe in the future, to unabashedly manifest a new golden age.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable.
It's unfalsifiable because the evidence that would prove or disprove election fraud was illegally destroyed. Ballot chains of custody were destroyed across several swing states. You can recount the ballots as many times as you want but you can't prove where any of those ballots came from. This is after several swing states simultaneously stopped counting on Election Day only to return massive pro-Biden dumps at 6am a few hours later.
It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls
This will sound unbearably demented to most posters here, and I'm aware of that, and fine with this, because I mean it earnestly: all talk of Trump's "shortfalls" is nonsense. Trump is obviously one of the greatest Americans to ever live. He spurred the renaissance of New York, mastered reality TV, turned his fathers modest real estate portfolio into a multi-billion dollar company synonymous with wealth as one of the most famous people to ever exist, then ran for president as a private citizen despite major opposition from both parties and won. He casually reinvents the language every time he speaks. He tried to do a denuclearization deal with Russia and China, we were literally on the cusp of world peace, and we couldn't get there because of the Russia hoax. Fundamentally we aren't good enough for Donald Trump. We were all sitting around debating the doom of Western Civilization and pro-woke and anti-woke and he's the only guy to stand up and say, we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on, we should make Detroit wealthy again, we should make San Francisco a paradise again, we should Make America Great Again, and going further than that we should Make America Greater Than Ever Before. He just did it casually, because he wanted to help his country, when he was full of success and worldly things. (Multibillionaire, supermodel wife, luxury real estate empire, grandchildren and kids.) And we sit around debating things like his tone and his shortfalls because, I guess, people have told so many lies about him that we cynically believe some of them have to be true.
Trump is unfathomably based for not dropping the 2020 election. Anyone else would have let themselves be bullied out of it. Anyone else would have quietly dropped the issue and made a nice conciliatory speech and walked away beat. But Washington DC is governed by a fundamentally sick culture where the wealth of the greatest country in the world is spent making the world a worser place. There is immense pressure within the system, all the time, to pillage everything for the wealth of the people running it, bomb some more countries for the defense contracts, ruin the world for the price it cost to ruin, then pay the experts to sell their misconceptions as the smartest ideas on earth. It takes immense pressure to not cave and do something good. Most presidents only do it a few times. Trump did it over and over and over again, more than anybody, even up to the point of this most important thing. They stole the election from him and he refused to concede it, even as they accused him of destroying democracy.
That's why he's going to win too, and why he won in 2016 (and 2020 alike). It's the quality from that first Republican debate in 2016, when Trump stood on stage and was the only candidate to say he wouldn't pledge to endorse the Republican nom.
Trump is the only candidate. He's the only one actually willing to stand up and fight. We all forgot what it even looked like to fight, we were all living in a world of sitting around waiting for Caesar and collapse and depression and loss, waiting and watching and coping. He makes it look easy! "Moderating" wouldn't help. All his "shortfalls" are his best qualities and why he is in fact The Best and will win at all. While we were sitting around passively debating the death of America he was imagining making America Greater Than Ever Before. You just come down the escalator, and you fight, and you win, and it's easy. And then you win some more.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
I guess for me part of the value is that e-ink tablets can't do what an iPad can do. I don't want to be distracted by discord and twitter. I don't want movies and webpages. And I think e-ink looks beautiful and it helps me want to read more instead of getting sucked into the scroll.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
e-ink is a specific technology, daylight isn't using it. e-ink is owned by the E Ink Corporation. It's fundamentally different from an LCD, it uses electricity to flip microcapsules onto and off the back of a transparent surface. Some of these microcapsules are black and some are white. This is what gives the image such a crisp paper-feel, it's not emitting light like an LCD, it's actually static material that reflects light. Every image is basically etched into the tablet. It's also why draw times are so slow and there tends to be a "ghosting" problem. Recently developers figured how to get this process to simulate color, which seems like it's reaching almost good-enough.
Daylight isn't using e-ink, they're using what's called "transflective LCD". It's an LCD with an extra reflective layer underneath so that light from the environment reflects onto the image. This article has some more in-depth explanations:
https://newhavendisplay.com/blog/transmissive-vs-reflective-vs-transflective-displays/
Using LCD is how daylight solved the screen refresh rate and ghosting and other latency. It seems like they're basically the first mover to try this approach for paper-like tablets instead of using e-ink. I'm very curious to see how it looks, especially because the amber backlight seems like a huge plus. In the few videos I can find online it looks fine. But e-ink looks incredible to me and I'm not sure I want to give that up.
I also miss the kindle keyboard. I think that was a phenomenal product and a genuine step forward in man's history with technology. It wowed me. Everything looked good, it was a computer made human, it was a better experience than reading a physical book. Buttons were mechanically simple and simpler than turning a page. I could carry 100 books in my pocket. Instant dictionary. It was great. I never got over the switch to touchscreens, which ruined the user interface (I have to put my hand between my eyes and what I'm reading). The kindle keyboard seemed to disappear from Amazon's service page, they've stopped supporting it, I have no idea why, maybe some patent trolling. I think it's a shame that trendline in technology was abandoned. We give kids in schools these junky laptops that only distract them when we have all the technology for making incredible learning devices ready-to-hand. I can't overstate my enthusiasm about this. We have all the technology to make ultimate reading-learning devices, we have the technology to make something that is well-tuned to the human experience, more well-tuned than anything we have ever made before. Instead of designing new computers for better features that we passively let alter our day-to-day, we could be making superdevices that progressively advance our future with technology. And we basically stopped that whole technological line so we could stream Netflix on everything, and we put touchscreens where they don't belong, and now the supervisionaries are chasing crazy boondoggles like neuralink. Gahjhhjhhhh
I really want daylight to be good, the amber backlight alone is exciting, but I need to see how it compares to e-ink before I can commit to one.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
How do you feel about reading on the Remarkable? Everyone has great things to say about sketching and taking notes, which would be a nice feature, but I primarily imagine using it to read books, especially PDFs I can't get to look nice on my kindle.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
PDFs is a big use case, since if I wanted to just stick with epubs I could just stick with my kindle. How do you feel about the lag and overall design? I don't mind the slow refresh for e-ink in general, and I know I can configure Boox pretty extensively through the menu, but I think it would annoy me trying to do general OS-like stuff swiping around if the interface was jank.
Also, how long does the battery usually last you?
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Kamala is an exceptionally dumb politician. She mostly never knows what she's talking about. Even when she does she can't avoid noodles spilling out of her mouth. This was all basically priced-in until August, when for political reasons the Democrat base pretended she was this amazing undiscovered talent. "Joy!" But we knew this already. I predicted in August that it wouldn't last until November, and here we are.
I think Kamala is actually kind of likeable for being so dumb. Her answer the kther week about shooting a criminal with her very real gun is one example. Another is a rumor I saw going around that the once-great White House Cocaine was actually hers, not Hunter Biden's. Well, whatever, probably not, but granted that she's a normal untalented striver who somehow ended up as VP, that implies a different path for her to run on. Briefing her on policy issues way out of her depth isn't working.
I've heard she's deeply unlikeable in private and chews through her staff. Which makes me wonder how she got this far. Somebody has to like her!
Compare Kamala's world salad to other politicians. Trump rambles because he is always juggling three or four different conversations, and he doesn't bother with the political cliches that tie everything together. But he's basically perfectly intelligible, which is how we get regular two-movies-one-screen on partisan lines. Biden rambles because he's going senile, but speaks in perfectly normal sentences when he's having a good day. He was always fairly dumb by Washington standards, but it was an aggressive and belligerent dumbness that made him colorful and interesting. Obama almost never gave word salad unless he was away from his teleprompter at an unexpected moment. Hillary was too smart for this. And it's possible Bush was only incoherent when he wanted to look folksy.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Does anyone have strong opinions about e-ink tablets? I'm in the market to upgrade from a Kindle and debating a few options:
- DayLightCo has amber backlight and can be used outdoors, but isn't true e-ink. I'm not sure how the image "beauty" will decay. It's the only one with full 60hz support, and it doesn't support colors.
- Remarkable: These look stunning. I love the true e-ink look. But they have a closed system that doesn't support most apps (Obsidian) without tinkering. I've heard they're just a glorified notepad.
- Boox has the worst name but the most features, and seems to support a lot out of the box. I can't put my finger on why they give me the wrong impression.
Any thoughts appreciated.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
A WSJ story about two Facebook accounts, and a NYT story about one. If these campaigns were worth taking seriously there'd be more to show for it. Right now scrolling twitter in fear of Russian Propaganda is pretty out-there in risk-perception. I read an article today about a sick cow in Idaho, maybe I'll go vegan.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
That would be even emptier. Be careful about what you see on social media, because it could have the same effect as Russian disinformation. That parses to something like: Look both ways before you cross the street, because a plane could fall on you.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Computer, enhance:
Over the last three days, Chinese ambassadors, Russian-backed news outlets and others with ties to Russia and China have tweeted more than 1,200 times about the United States,
Wow, foreign infiltrators tweeted a thousand times! That's a lot of tweets.
Come on, there is no evidence that these campaigns are barely statistically significant. I know guys who put out that many tweets in a week.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
This is an unfalsifiable theory. If there is Russian interference, hey, wow, I was right. If there's not, well, whatever, I was just being careful, and it's always good to be careful.
Russian social media campaigns being in any way influential is extremely implausible. Whatever they might be spending would be a drop in the bucket relative to what Americans spend on social media all the time. That has been the case every time a number is attached to whatever Russia is supposedly spending.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
This leads to the most unhinged takes bubbling up to the surface
But lots of these takes are not unhinged.
FEMA distributes relief to migrants and illegals. That's not a conspiracy or furtive rumor. That's a basic function it performs with budget allocations and press releases and grants. Noticing that FEMA is now claiming to be out of money is not some weird partisan non-sequitur. It's a basic observation of cause-and-effect: they spent money on illegals and now are out of money for Americans.
Likewise, rumors about FEMA getting in the way. This is rumoring of the worst sort, but it's also correct to talk about it. You have first-hand accounts of people claiming that FEMA officers are confiscating relief and getting in the way. Imagine that that happened to you -- well, some guy on twitter concluded that this is just all part of a broken media incentive infrastructure, so it doesn't matter if it's true or false. Comforting!
The emoji in triplicate really works. Singular is visually small and doesn't leave the same imprint.
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