benmmurphy
4d ago
it makes sense for Biden to be complaining about fact checking disappearing when the executive under his control tried to coerce social media into using fact checking to remove content that was critical or contradicted his government's policies. hopefully this position gets some criticism because he is essentially complaining elon and zuck have taken his toys away.
benmmurphy
6d ago
Someone could make a crazy work of fiction out of Garmin's life. This whole Calliope story in the Sandman (https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/the-sandman-episode-calliope-ending-explained) along with the scientology connection where his parents were apparently second in charge in the UK. They could have Garmin making a pact with the aliens to commit rape against women in order to spread an alien virus in exchange for his fame.
benmmurphy
7d ago
regardless of the underlying issues and whether blank state is true or not as soon as you bring in quotas it changes peoples incentives and may change the equilibrium. if you required quotas for left handed people then if left handed people could coordinate to reduce their personal investment then left handed people would start performing worse in the equilibrium. take a toy example where left-handed people all are able to agree to spend half the time they otherwise would have spent in university studying. if quotas are rigid then they are still going to get same personal output but at a lower personal cost.
the reason for the coordination requirement is because I would expect intra-handness competition between lefties would incentivise people to maintain the same personal investment in the quota system.
benmmurphy
9d ago
ACB is also close to 'all cops are bastards' which was a popular slogan during BLM but they used the acronym ACAB.
benmmurphy
13d ago
some hindu extremists cooperating with basque separatists based in Canada could carry out a terror attack on the US. they could flee back to Quebec then Quebec could shield them from extradition providing a justification for US military to enter Canada.
benmmurphy
17d ago
this was just his green beret training in action. he had to provide id to the rental service but its possible they may have rejected his military id or his passport so by carrying both he reduced the chance his operation may have been scuttled.
benmmurphy
17d ago
is it possible to just stagger your purchases over a sufficiently long time period or have a large number of properties that have a legitimate need for ammonium nitrate then just start stockpiling surplus or use a combination of the above.
benmmurphy
17d ago
i feel like rotherham is just the same shit as the catholic church but no-one actually learned the lesson of the catholic church. if people are doing bad stuff then you need to stop them from doing bad stuff. preserving the 'institution' or some other higher value is just some scam the bad people are using to convince you to continue letting them to do the bad stuff.
benmmurphy
18d ago
It's also kind of insane that the Rotherham crimes were able to occur because there is a lot of red-tape you have to deal with if you have contact with children in the UK. Apparently, some of the men involved had criminal convictions which should have automatically barred them from having regular contact with children who are not their own. So not only were the police ignoring accusations of sexual assault but they were also ignoring crimes where the prosecution should be very straight forward. Also, people in positions of authority who deal with children are meant to be trained to notice signs of abuse and I believe there also mandatory reporting requirements. So the people who covered this up or ignored it not only fucked up their jobs but it is likely they committed some kind of criminal act as well.
benmmurphy
19d ago
it feels weird because this the whole point of 'disparate impact' decisions from the courts in the past. apparently, some groups were coming up with proxies to derive their desired racial preferences instead of using explicit discrimination but now Harvard and other universities are doing exactly that and its magically ok. its even more messed up because i'm pretty sure i've seen them make statements into the public record saying this was exactly what they were planning to do.
benmmurphy
21d ago
I think its crazy to think at the olympic tier men and women are not putting in the same hours training. They are going to have same coaches and if a coach sees an edge they can push at this level they will force their athletes to do it. Possibly some of the prevalence of drugs is even due to pressure from coaches.
benmmurphy
21d ago
That reference to running is weird as well because pacesetters are actually doing part of the work that a runner would otherwise do (https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/drafting-runners-research/). Though, I'm not sure having access to faster male pacesetters is that useful. I'm sure you could always find some female pacesetters to run at the same speed as a male for part of the race. But I guess the problem is they wouldn't be able to run as far at that pace and you are not able to continuously swap them out. My theory of pacesetters for faster times is they run part of the race at a desired pace and they take the lead in order to take some of the work away from other runners then they fall off at some point because they are not able to maintain that pace while doing the extra work for the whole race.
benmmurphy
27d ago
Not a crime I would think. Just standard lying in politics.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
It's like when you go to the shop and you get a 75% discount and think you saved a lot of money.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
Are you sure this is not some kind of parallel construction scam where for some reason someone in the pipeline is trying to hide how they really made the discovery?
I'm not sure how well the QALY stuff works in practice. I heard stuff about the public being able to pressure the NHS into funding treatments that didn't pass QALY tests. Puberty blockers were also funded by the NHS at some point. Though, I think this treatment seems to be around £1000/year so maybe if your QALY bar is £20,000/QALY then you can make the numbers work if you are able to find some marginal net improvement across the cohort. But I'm very suspicious of these mental health treatments. What if some dude claims if he spends £1000/year on good quality alcohol that passes the QALY bar? At what point does it morph between healthcare and funding utility monster lifestyle choices?
benmmurphy
1mo ago
Does the bribe actually work or does the Judge just take the money and then claim the other family paid more so you will need pony up some more?
benmmurphy
1mo ago
If you want to avoid a cult and want to do X then don't do X with a bunch of other people in an organized way.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
It's also probably not the worst pardon in history. I was under the impression domestic terrorists had previously been pardoned. Bill Clinton pardoned Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg from the Weather Underground and granted clemency to 16 members of the FALN terrorist organization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controversy).
benmmurphy
2mo ago
More evidence for the dead internet theory. I saw this tweet which has a picture of two users discussing bluesky (https://x.com/crystalandqueue/status/1857526125401878582).
Blondie6312: Are you on Bluesky yet?
Michell33650674: Nobody seems to be seeing my posts stating Bluesky PERMANENTLY BANNED ME for stating that the election was rigged
Based on the account names I would suspect those accounts are bots, but maybe boomers when picking account names try and pick what they want and then either the site auto-fills these number for them or they just mash the keyboard. But with the advent of LLMs presumably there are a lot of people just running bots even just for the lolz.
benmmurphy
2mo ago
The Babylon Bee was serving an underserved market. The Babylon Bee might individually be more relevant than the Onion but not so relevant when compared to all the Cathedral media. Of course that is an unfair comparison, but if you compare Cathedral vs anti-Cathedral media then Cathedral media in total is more relevant.
benmmurphy
2mo ago
don't the pollers have some degree of freedom because they sample based on demographics and not purely random. presumably they use this to perform adjustments. i also assume they poll the chance of the person voting as well and don't just make that number up.
benmmurphy
2mo ago
I thought the steelman would be something like the message was in related to FEMA media shots and they wanted to avoid political signage in the media they produced and for some reason they mistakenly said 'Trump signs' instead of 'political signage'.
benmmurphy
2mo ago
I think this is because at the moment the left dominates a lot of the idea institutions like universities and the media. If it was the other way around I'm sure the right would be intolerant of different ideas and the left would be more accepting. There are people in both groups that are accepting of a free exchange of ideas but I think the majority or the people that actually end up in control of these movements have the opinion of free speech when I'm weak but controlled speech when I'm strong.
it could also be massive case of ass covering. 4 years ago security was screwed up during the certification process and there have been multiple attempts on Trumps life. you don't want to be the person in charge if something goes wrong unless you have checked every box.
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