birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
4d ago
our current political environment is following closely on the heels of a full blown moral panic
It feels like we've been hopping from one moral panic to another since at least 2001.
Would you mind narrowing that down?
birb_cromble
7d ago
9070 xt
A buddy of mine recently got one of these and he is absolutely blown away by how much AMD seems to have improved with this generation.
If you can score one at MSRP, they seem like a great deal.
birb_cromble
13d ago
It wasn't only the Amish directly, even if they were the primary targets. For a lot of people, seeing swat teams raiding their neighbors' barns was the first time they'd ever really been forced to actually look at government overreach in a way that they couldn't ignore or rationalize.
birb_cromble
13d ago
That's precisely the reason I called it a hail Mary. At that point, I'd be more worried about Looking Like I Was Doing Something than winning the case.
birb_cromble
13d ago
The risk is that beating on a defeated old man alienates people
I don't know about the country at large, but after 2021's vaccine mandates and milk raids, there is a sizable chunk of rural PA/WV/KY/TN that loathes Biden with an unrelenting intensity that I cannot adequately describe in human words. That particular demographic isn't going to get sick of it anytime soon.
birb_cromble
13d ago
DOJ's rebuttal is ???.
Were I in the DOJ lawyer's unenviable position, I think my hail Mary throw would be to subpoena Joe Biden himself and get him to declare in court that he did, in fact, authorize the pardon. I'd also try to schedule the testimony for as late in the day as possible.
birb_cromble
14d ago
The files implicate one or more politically powerful figures who are not Trump or member of his administration
I know this isn't anything provable, or even probable, but I think it's interesting to see just how accommodating Chuck Schumer has become lately.
birb_cromble
24d ago
I can't believe I missed that. Thanks!
birb_cromble
24d ago
Looking at the poll PDF, all it says is "registered voters". I couldn't find anything about the population demographics.
Is that published anywhere? I'd like to be proven wrong, but it's been my experience that when a polling agency doesn't publish that data, it's because the polled population is non-representative
birb_cromble
26d ago
because that isn't on the table
Maybe I am in a filter bubble, but I've seen quite a lot of hemming and hawing lately that Trump's refusal to provide a security guarantee to the Ukraine is proof that he is a Russian asset.
If that is a common argument, I am somewhat perplexed at the idea that ground troops aren't on the table.
Am I wrong that it's a common argument, or is there some way to provide a guarantee that doesn't inevitably degenerate to boots on the ground?
birb_cromble
27d ago
The ambiguity and slow ramping is the point, make the callouts start from the radicals to give the appearance that accusations are always baseless and train people to ignore them from historic allies and partners
I think the Trump administration being "pro not sending poor rural American guys to get their legs and genitals blown off in foreign countries" has at least as much explanatory power as Trump being a "Russian asset", with the added benefit of being simpler, to boot.
birb_cromble
27d ago
less soul crushing than tending a computer lab in a public high school
In 2025? You're probably right.
If I'm comparing a high school in 1999 to today's startup ecology? I'll take the high school.
birb_cromble
27d ago
I sympathize with the guy in your example.
Realistically, I know I could make more money than I do now by grinding leetcode and hopping from one startup to another every three years. I choose not to do that, though, because the entire associated process is miserable and incentivizes collecting your paycheck and running before the whole house of cards collapses around you.
I'm pretty sure that if I were forced into that, "kicking and screaming", I'd just go back to being a welder for half what I'm making now.
birb_cromble
27d ago
A Romney win, if followed by competent government (a huge if in the modern-day) was probably the last serious chance the GOP's "respectability" faction had to wrest the party's momentum away from the insurgent TEA-party/populist wing which ultimately coalesced under Trump.
While I agree that Romney's loss did not polarize anyone, in hindsight I do believe it had a surprising effect of ruining one of the left's most effective memetic attacks.
The DNC ran ran a lot of smear campaigns on Romney in an attempt to alienate the GOP base and activate their own.
Unfortunately, large swaths of the GOP voter base already viewed Romney as a worthless, squishy RINO who's main value was that he probably wouldn't ruin things as fast as Obama would.
On the DNC side, the voters completely believed it, and my hardcore left wing acquaintances genuinely meant it when they called him a "dog murdering polygamy cultist".
This caused two things to happen. The first is that this is probably the start of the DNC voter's hysteria floor moving from 1/10 to 6/10, and that made it considerably harder for leadership to unwind the outrage when it was no longer politically useful. This reached a peak in the fiery but mostly peaceful protests of 2020, but remains a problem even half a decade later.
On the GOP side, it was different. The fact that the current candidate is always some variant of a dog murdering polygamy cultist, while the previous candidate is always a guy who you may not agree with, but you can respect his principles, suddenly become a Noticeable Narrative to the GOP rank and file. Once they Noticed, imthey were memetically inoculated, and immediately responded internally with some variant of "if you're going to call the most milquetoast mother fucker we can possibly find SatanHitler, then why should I believe you about anything at all? Don't piss in my face and tell me it's raining".
Then, in 2016, Trump showed up, and suddenly the left could neither dial up their outrage knob enough to be noticeable, nor could they demoralize the right with appeals to respectability.
To me at least, it's a pretty clear trend line to our present circumstances.
birb_cromble
27d ago
Don't forget operation choke point.
birb_cromble
30d ago
blue collar profitable companies
In a lot of cases, I think the cost/benefit ratio isn't there.
Imagine you're you're a hostile actor who's targeted a successful taxidermy ship outside Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky. What are your exploitation vectors?
They don't have any kind of in house network. They keep all their financials on "The Quick Books", which is an extremely hardened cloud offering. Most contact is done through Facebook and cell phone messages, if not in person.
Even if you do get in, they don't usually have huge cash reserves that you could leverage. All of the corporate value is in capital.
So say you lock and ransom the circa-2011 PC that's sitting in the back room. Now what? They're going to say "damned thing doesn't work", throw it out, and get a laptop or tablet from The Best Buy over in Paducah.
Now, if you wanted to talk about something like small, independent CPAs, I have similar questions.
birb_cromble
1mo ago
I'm not an expert on this area, and could use some help.
Was the Department of Ed created via statute, or was it created by the executive to enforce a law that didn't specifically call for its creation?
I don't necessarily want AI banned, but I'd like to see heavy moderation against a few common failure modes.
The first is that it's often used as an argument to authority. "I'm right because the God machine agrees with me" is a bad argument, but it seems to be a common one in the LLMposting on this site.
The second is that it seems to be used to pad the word count of a post. Word count as a proxy for quality is already a problem on this site, and AI posts make it worse.
If someone is using it as an augmented search engine that's fine, and should probably treated as such. Bare links to Google would trigger a ban, so why wouldn't dumping pages upon pages of AI output?
birb_cromble
1mo ago
Thank you, but I painstakingly plan all of my free jazz in a fugue state, and it is then revealed to me as I play in the form of coincidental symbolism in the venue's wallpaper.
birb_cromble
1mo ago
I'm asking because the general argument against immigration is an indirect economic argument.
Put bluntly, the people around me who get busted stealing catalytic converters from cars and stabbing women in the ass with box cutters aren't named McDonald or Orbison.
birb_cromble
2mo ago
It used to be that if you could make it to Harrisonburg you were safe. These days I don't even know how far you have to go to avoid it.
birb_cromble
2mo ago
respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage
I won't believe this until I see a NYC federal building that's decked out like a bodega.
birb_cromble
2mo ago
Plus, they're all fit. I don't think I've seen an obese Patriot Front member, ever
They also have a suspiciously high rate of Oakley sunglass and Danner boot ownership.
birb_cromble
2mo ago
Are Hoteps actually…common? Outside of hand-wringing news columns feeding off the latest Ye controversies.
I threw darts and ate beef jerky with one in Lexington Kentucky in 2019, so they definitely exist.
Does anybody here care to recommend a bag or a backpack? I'm looking for something fairly rugged that I can use to lug around a delicate object that's about 8"x8"x8", with external pockets for accessories.
Most camera bags are a little too narrow for that, but that's the basic idea I'm trying to find.
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