aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
2d ago
My empathy for trans people is precisely why I find the entire phenomenon so impossible to look away from. I can find in myself some ability to reason myself into what they're claiming to be going through. I can imagine myself as a kid, not particularly popular and with plenty of angst, deciding that what is really wrong with me is my gender identity and clamping down on that idea. I am privileged to know what not doing that results in and it's a good life where I get over my angst. I fear for people who might trap themselves in a false understanding of the world that will lead them to living much worse lives than they could have led.
I know that memes are powerful enough to do this people. Memes can bend people into myrters, Jihadists, self immolators kamikaze pilots, and many other forms in service of the meme. Maybe the framing where I'm cis by default is true and they really are experiencing some extra sense that I am blind to. But I know, absolutely know, that given the right circumstances growing up I could have been made to think I was feeling that sense. I know, absolutely know, that if I had convinced myself of it I would be stubborn enough to cement it into my identity. Because of this I know that there is a boy somewhere that is going to sacrifice his health and exceptionally happy future to chase being a mere mimic of a woman. I see myself in him, I recognize that for the grace of god go I, and that breaks my heart.
aqouta
2d ago
Sick of the bots and echo chamber that X has become
It's very easy to make your X feed not like this. block or mute a dozen or so accounts and the algorithm mostly takes care of you. You get more of what you interact with so if you're arguing with right wingers you'll see more right wingers. Every time I look at the profile of someone who complains about this sort of thing I always find pages and pages of arguments with the people they're complaining about also that they're following tons of people with pages and pages of arguments with the people they're talking about. It's so obvious to see too, go on X and reply to one of the China shill accounts, you will very quickly start seeing tons of them. I'm convinced most of the calls of people who think X has changed since Musk took over are really just seeing that the algorithm is no longer suppressing right wing accounts that they were used to "dunking" on and are getting the adjustments that were normal to suck you into any other group on X.
Alright, I'll bite.
- 85% chance he gets most loop holes closed. 70% he makes the lives of illegal residents on average worse in some measurable way. 50% chance we get some wide spread e-verify leading to lots of self deportations. 40% chance net migration(new arrivals - deportation of any sort) is negative over his term. 10% chance anything that actually looks like wide spread forced deportation of Illegal immigrants that aren't breaking non-immigration related laws.
- 25% only because I don't think the bar for largest in history is really that large and just sending known criminals back might qualify.
- 25% chance only because I think he won't really do the tariff thing and I'm going to be super lenient on what counts as lower inflation. If he means deflation and intends to do the tariffs then more like 2%.
- Aren't we already basically there? Near there? This site seems to think China leads us by a bit in total MTOE "Million tons of oil equivalent" which seems like something we can't really reverse easily. Maybe if AI goes super big and the data centers live in the US and we produce a bunch of nuclear to run them in 10 years but I don't think we would even really want to put that much effort into this. 20% chance and it'd probably be a mistake to make this a goal.
- Depends on what the definition of this is. I could certainly see us bringing more production home in automated factories, I don't think it'd be the win for the middle class people expect it to be. Not sure how to formalize this into a prediction. 70% chance our net trade balance goes up? Almost impossible to do this while fighting inflation.
- 60% on tax cuts for the middle class entirely paid for by deficit spending. I don't know about the no tax on tips thing, it's a really quite bad idea. Get ready to be basically required to tip for everything. Bonuses will be renamed tips.
- 85% only because Trump himself is a litigious goblin man who obviously doesn't care about freedom of speech but for the branding.
- World war three doesn't happen 98%. Peace in the middle easy 10%, almost nothing to do with Trump but he would take credit. Iron Eagle dome 3%, doesn't even really make sense and the attempt is responsible for a lot of the 2% chance ww3 happens, undermining MAD is BAD.
- Don't know what this means really.
- Don't know how to make this a prediction. There isn't really a migrant crime epidemic. He might do something with Mexico to fight the cartels but I doubt it would succeed, don't know how to make it into a prediction though.
aqouta
19d ago
One reason polling and prediction markets pre-election are interesting is that you can see reactions to the politics being preformed before our eyes. When Trump does the McDonald's thing the context of whether this hurt or helped him in the polls is actually very interesting and says something about the American voter. When dems drop Biden and put up Kamala the trajectory of the polls is interesting. Who 'won' the debate does appear to have an answer and the poll swing shows it.
aqouta
21d ago
I'm personally giga device banned from reddit. Even with updating an IP and spoofing several finger printing things and going in with a VPN any account I create has every post auto hidden and the password to the account doesn't work to log in. Almost certainly for /r/drama related posting though. Things like that were becoming more common.
aqouta
21d ago
Sure but like, at that point the bios passwords aren't really necessary right? We're talking about a level of access and familiarity with the system that makes this look like having a partial print of your home's key for a team that is totally capable of just removing your door form its hinges.
aqouta
23d ago
I would really, strongly, urge you not too try to extrapolate how a home computer bios configuration works to voting machines. It's bad whenever there is a leak of any kind of course but this is like if there was a leak of the physical key design to the entrance of the polling location that still has armed guards stations 24/7. To make use of these you'd need to know which keys correspond to which machine, have prolonged physical access to the machines, plug a keyboard or some peripheral device into them and then maybe you'd be able to do something unclear.
aqouta
24d ago
Seems odd to me to define all sexual art as porn. My understanding of porn is that it has the purpose of titillation, not pain. One can certainly construct sexual art but it seems different than porn in an important way.
aqouta
28d ago
I don't know why this claim keeps coming up, Bernie's path to the nomination required the rest of the pool to cooperate with him to split the vote of the majority position. When it came to having to win one on one he didn't. period. End of story. It's not ratfucking to notice you're splitting a position and stop doing that so someone with minority support who you don't agree with doesn't take the nomination.
aqouta
1mo ago
Have you actually ever downloaded a model and tried making ai art beyond the basic stuff you get on the like chat gpt?
I think a lot of people don't actually understand that there is actually a lot of real decision an expression able to be done with ai art. I've downloaded A1111 and a few models, loras and tools. Typically to make anything interesting takes generating hundreds of images off of base prompts, often including technique like giving the model a wire frame for subject body positioning as well as painting the image to have different prompts populate different parts of the image. Then once I make a good base image I'll use inpainting to have it redraw some sections using a number of nobs and dials with new crafted prompts. Sometimes I'll even take an image into M$ paint and do some crude drawings because it can get stuck on colors.
It's certainly less time consuming and difficult that personally taking pen/pencil/brush to paper but I think a lot of people are under the impression that AI art generation is actually just entering a really specific prompt and are missing out on a genuine advancement putting creative tools in the hands of people who no longer need to spend hundreds or thousands of hours practicing things not really directly related to creativity.
aqouta
1mo ago
I'm afraid the payout ratio for any of these would make the stakes pretty onerous on you, at 99% odds you'd be getting $1 out of a $100 staked bet. I'm willing to escrow some cash or crypto on any of these with a third party or just go off honor. I just made a manifold account, don't see anything exactly right but might be looking in the wrong spot. The 75% musk one would be the most exciting probably if not the most favorable EV to me. I'd be willing to stake up to $200 on that line without demanding an escrow.
aqouta
1mo ago
Trump will declare that he rightfully won and Harris only won due to fraud (99.9%)
Elon Musk will say it's very concerning and suspicious how many irregularities there are, and use his platform to spread that sentiment as much as he can (95%)
Elon Musk will outright declare that Harris's victory was fraudulent and that Trump is the real winner (85%)
Most Trump voters will believe Harris only won due to fraud (98%)
These odds seem really badly calibrated. I'm not even directionally against these but putting a 0.1% chance on something Trump does being unsuspected strikes me as madness and I'm not sure what Musk stands to gain from supporting Trump once he's conclusively lost. I'd put up money on any of these rates if you're interested.
aqouta
1mo ago
I work in tax credits, amongst which are renewable energy tax credits(ITC/PTC) although I mostly work with the LIHTC group and in more of a build the investment management tools role than anything that gets real deep on the finances. I remember around when the IRA came out there were some pro-nuclear provisions and some excitement around maybe having that come up as a new product type but haven't heard much of it since. Although I will say the numbers were being run, if they come out right I do think investment is possible.
aqouta
1mo ago
Yeah, LSD is too icon to actually change the name, it's just a trap for out of towners using voice gps navigation now when it suddenly interrupts their song for like 10 seconds while it says the fake name.
aqouta
1mo ago
You missed the best one, The iconic Lake Shore Drive in chicago got renamed to Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable Lake Shore Drive during BLM. Dusable was a french black man who maybe discovered Chicago but probably didn't and has a half dozen other things in the city named after him.
aqouta
1mo ago
So I am seeing people like Elon Musk repeat stuff (tweet here) about Democrats deliberately offering some sort of citizenship-for-votes scheme. Laying aside that there are other reasons besides nefarious ones to want to give legal status at least (not even necessarily citizenship) to people who have lived here in some cases for decades, he had a pretty specific claim, that the 1986 amnesty law flipped California blue effectively forever.
This is not the main thrust of your post but I've been on Twitter myself a bit lately and Elon Musk really is not a high quality poster. Charitably I think he just doesn't really spend that much time on high quality political discussions and his political diet seems to be heavily weighted by low effort right wing shitposters. The guy is running several very large companies, I'm not knocking his intelligence or whatever, but his posting is very low quality. I wouldn't take anything he says that seriously. I don't think I've ever seen a political take by him that even reaches the median post, not even top level post, of this forum. I really would quite like to like musk, he's culturally on my side by being someone who builds impressive things, but he's definitely not pumping out impressive political takes.
aqouta
2mo ago
Of course this is primarily a 2A discussion, there is no new angle on the PvI conflict out of this. We also have plenty of left of center people here, just not lot of progressives. Have you considered that the "pro Palestinian" position just isn't very strong?
aqouta
2mo ago
It seems like the state is doing a reasonably good job here, although it would be prudent to wait for more info. Though, of course if there's a bunch of info incriminating the pro-Israel guy then we probably wouldn't hear about it on this site, as the entire thing would just be ignored.
Consensus accusations are somehow even more obnoxious than consensus building. We have literal holocaust deniers here, the accusation that we don't allow or have anti-Israel takes or news posted is indefensible.
aqouta
2mo ago
Why on earth would anyone believe that the way to attack a strategy that relies on a very specific step up basis policy was to invent an entirely new type of tax? This makes no sense at all. End the step up basis, I'm on board, why would you keep the strategy working and but then add another tax on top instead of actually fixing it?
aqouta
2mo ago
Turns out I was wrong and that it is a hormonal IUD which according to her has less of these problems. She had just referred to it as an IUD before and I incorrectly assumed copper. But I guess it has potentially serious side effects is the exact answer I was looking for so thanks for your anecdote.
The wife is on a copper IUD, is there a downside to that which I'm not aware of? I mean I feel it on occasion which isn't pleasant but compared to all the other options it is always seemed strange to me that this wasn't the default. edit: asked the wife last evening, it is apparently a hormonal iud and not copper, which has less bad symptoms.
This would be a problem if every hospital was already a teaching hospital, but that is not the case.
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