Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
56m ago
Letting Enrique Tarrio out of a 22 year sentence is reprehensible imo. Kinda increases the incentives for doing political crimes now.
The BLM lawyers who firebombed a cop car got 12-15 months.
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
People renaming stuff for ideological reasons is bad actually.
Right. This community knows this progression. neutral rules are best, but once someone defects then trying to uphold the neutral rule is basically the same thing as unilateral disarmament.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
DCI is the only thing that ever made me sad I was a woodwind player.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
I dunno, looking at DCI corps beyond the deep south, they seem to have a decent black component - far more than you'd naively expect from just the corps' nominal catchment areas, like Blue Devils in Concord CA (3% black), SCV (2% black), The Academy [Tempe, AZ (6% black)], etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Actually, in the real world, when you ethnically cleanse undesirable populations for having the wrong religion you engender disgust and hatred in the majority of the rest of the world.
Ah yes, this is why Azerbaijan is having so much trouble selling their oil, considering their behavior towards Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh.
And why the world NGO-cracy condemned any attempts to help the Hutu genocidaire refugees in Congo, considering how they kept going after any Tutsis they could get their hands on.
It also explains why Turkey's continued repression of the Kurds got them kicked out of NATO, and why there's massive protests on every college campus about the genocidal atrocities being committed by the Sudanese Arabs towards the Christian and animist black Africans of South Sudan.
/sarcasm.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Yugi-oh appears to significantly over-index for black folks, at least when compared to MtG.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Or women otherwise engaged in home industry, to account for the historical pattern.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Harris lost 15m biden voters because she was too cosy with Cheneys? Is this the 'democrats weren't woke enough, so their supporters stayed home' argument?
Nothing succeeds like success. Nuking the legislative filibuster to make Puerto Rico and DC states, or otherwise passing big reforms that actually do things (not just the IRA with its patronage handouts that aren't even getting spent because of restrictive rules) make you look successful. Whinging and begging for table scraps from a dissident faction of the enemy party (let alone a dissident faction which contains your own party's biggest boogeymen circa 10 years ago) makes you look weak and desperate.
Supah_Schmendrick
9d ago
Maybe this suggests replacing "sharp-edged" bans with "terraforming" taxes. Only, how do you sell that to the voting masses? In the FDA example, this would have to look something like "instead of making the FDA/its employees subject to legal penalty if they pass some threshold of neglect in approving a drug that passes some threshold of side effects, tie their funding/salary to the volume of side effects"
Strathern/Goodhart's law - Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. You haven't actually solved anything - you've just changed the incentive to "control the number of side effects which get reported, or the number of incidents which legally can be described as 'side effects'."
Supah_Schmendrick
19d ago
As I said in a downstream reply, this is all a diversion. H1-B visas represent 85K per anum of imported workers.
That's what it is now - this got started in part because there was activism around increasing (perhaps substantially) the number of people admitted on such "skilled worker" visas, in order to fill the claimed shortfall in US skilled STEM talent.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
There's a big distinction between speciation and a nation that didn't even speak the same language in the 1800s. Almost like gross overgeneralizations are full of holes.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
Nationalism which is the english word for ethnos, without ethnicity, doesn't make sense.
Someone tell France that they really ought to be Bretons, Acquitanians, Burgundians, etc. etc. After all, until fairly recently they didn't even speak mutually-intelligible dialects of the same language, let alone share common ancestry! The Bretons are Celts, the Ile-de-France folks are Germanic, and the Languedoc is Mediterranean!
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
Which one of these societies is more successful?
Which one of these socieities would you rather be a part of?
You're missing the parts of these societies that most people actually interact with and care about on a day-to-day basis. How orderly are they? What are the crime levels? Is the government honest or corrupt? Do institutions generally function reliably and legibly in their putative roles, or is everything a mess of personal connections and last-minute improvisation? What about civil society - how common are fraternal organizations? Community organizations? Spiritual/faith-based organizations? What's the Gini coefficient?
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
There's a plausible argument that legalese is like a ceremony where you slaughter a cow and then look at the entrails to take the omens. It makes people feel that ceremonies were observed while having no effect on on the actual outcome. It works especially well on people who are a little dim.
In my experience, the legalese is there not for the people actually signing the contract, but instead for the people trying to resolve disputes about the contract years down the line. You're not trying to snow the other side; you're trying to get the completely unrelated judge or future lawyer to take your side in the future. Many of the strange phrasings are references to standard language which can be reliably interpreted in a particular way so long as the standard remains current, or attempts to cover every possible base and contingency.
LLMs are going to gish gallop the shit out of every lawyer alive today
It's not the lawyers you need to gish gallop, it's the judges. And if you do that, you're not going to like the results. You want courts to be predictable.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Intra-Hispanic prejudice is alive and well between immigrant groups in the US, too.
As an interesting example of this in real life, when the LA City Council got rocked by a leaked recording of some hispanic councilmembers speaking, erm, "bluntly" about racial matters in local politics, the remarks casting aspersions at the city's Oaxacan community (a Mexican state heavily dominated even today by fairly unassimilated Nahua, Maya and other indio groups) had just about as much impact as ones making fun of the city's black political elite. See, e.g. news coverage here.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
something else that happens to have FAA red-green lighting (which wouldn't make sense for a military stealth drone experiment or for alien aircraft)
Seems like a decent disguise, though.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I agree. I just wanted to say that vigilantism isn't just limited to extrajudicial killing.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
You want some kind of civil wrongful death statute, otherwise someone who gets killed by a reckless driver or due to a defective product couldn't get money damages for it.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Vigilantism isn't just when someone ends up dead. Spiderman is still a vigilante when he leaves perps bound and webbed for the cops to find (fits the legal definitions of battery and false imprisonment).
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Mass shootings are easier, as horrible and macabre as it is to say it. Soft institutional targets that don't move and don't have to be tracked down.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
If you're suicidal, you're most likely in a deep, deep depression. Depressed people don't exactly have high motivation or impetus to do stuff, and assassinations - even if you're not planning to survive it - take planning and effort. Tracking down one random person (who presumably, because of their high-profile statute, puts effort into maintaining their personal privacy and security) and actually getting to them with a lethal weapon of some type seems like an awful lot of work.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I said the lion's share goes to higher salaries and higher admin costs. The abstract of the study I linked in my comment:
The United States far outspends Canada on health care, but the sources of additional spending are unclear. We evaluated the importance of incomes, administration, and medical interventions in this difference. Pooling various sources, we calculated medical personnel incomes, administrative expenses, and procedure volume and intensity for the United States and Canada. We found that Canada spent $1,589 per capita less on physicians and hospitals in 2002. Administration accounted for the largest share of this difference (39%), followed by incomes (31%), and more intensive provision of medical services (14%). Whether this additional spending is wasteful or warranted is unknown.
31% + 39% = 70% - over two thirds of the U.S.'s increased per capita physician and hospital spend over Canada's is down to those two things. That's "the lion's share" by any measure.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I think it's down to the fact that Christianity lays out the right philosophical substrate for it by venerating the immaterial and rejecting material urges.
Wouldn't Buddhism be the motherlode of such ideas, then?
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Your anger at health insurance companies is misplaced.
The insurance companies, the AMA, and the feds are locked together in a perverse cycle that produces a system that somehow spends even more on healthcare than socialized medicine countries...but the lion's share of the extra money goes to doctor's salaries (artificial scarcity driven by the AMA, med schools, and residency limitations) and ever-increasing administrative costs (additional regulations and insurance bureaucracy).
First example
Second example
More options
Context Copy link