chooky
17hr ago
Maybe, but there is also not much criticizing me that I would not swing. McCain was an old man hawk with a populist side kick - the obvious wrong choice. Romney was a good choice but this is the coin flip of centrist vs centrist - okay, I lean Dem based on this, but, I mean, I dont think we will ever see a candidate on either side as good as either of these guys for at least a decade. I think it has been extremely correct to vote against Trump every time, thougb I cede that has handlers did a pretty good job on his first term - unfortunately, Trump inmediately undid all the good of TCJA in his second term.
chooky
19hr ago
No. I thought Obama was good abd vastly superior in 2008, especially with Palin as a proto-Trump and even more with Obama's Iraq war opposition since I view that war as a huge error. I greatly regret not voting for Romney in 2016, though in my defense I think that Obama and Romney were both basically good choices. Today, I do not believe there is any scenario in which the Democrats present me with a good candidate, but the Republicans keep giving me Trump. It would take very little for me to vote against a Sanders-esque Dem nominee - probably literally anyone except Vance or with the last name Trump.
chooky
21hr ago
I would never vote for Trump, for sure, but the Republicans haven't sought moderate votes with a presidential candidate since Romney. I would have absolutely voted for someone like Rubio over Harris in 2024.
chooky
23hr ago
It sounds like you think TKAM's condemnation of "secular" morality is good, though I think that your definition/labelling of identity-based morality as "secular" is quite poor. (For one, the peak of contemporary non-religious morality is probably MLK's "I have a dream" speech, which strongly rejects identity as the main driver of morality.)
But given that this is a right-leaning forum and a thread in which most posters seem very sympathetic to Christianity, I'm now even more confused why TKAM would be "worthless slop" and "actively detrimental to creating wisdom". Perhaps it is my own bias, but I think that identity-based morality is not very good and that works critiquing it would usually be thought of as "good" from a morality perspective.
chooky
1d ago
This is like saying Trump wouldnt do somethung crazy like follow through on his campaign promises to implement a bunch of tariffs. Why on earth would I expect that Trump is not serious about lowering interest rates no matter what?
chooky
1d ago
Do you means shits on "non-secular" morality? Jonah can be easily read as a critique of religious righteousness. Personally, I think the critique is fairly trenchant.
chooky
2d ago
What is the complaint against To Kill a Mockingbird? (And no fair bringing up Go Set a Watchman.)
chooky
15d ago
Consumption taxes are generally considered the best taxes, but they are pretty damn regressive. This sounds... really good from an efficiency standpoint, is appropriately targeted on the wealthy (though we need some way to exclude middle class HELOCs) and seems much harder to game than a consumption tax too. Go run for office.
chooky
15d ago
Eh, oil futures are down to 80-85, which seems consistent with the deal to reopen Strait holding. This is still 25-30% above pre-war, so we still have a substantial lingering impact as shipping and inventories slowly normalize.
chooky
17d ago
This kind of seems to me like a ringing endorsement from the USG about just how great and valuable Anthropic's models are! Certainly, the USG could never ever permit Anthropic or OpenAI to ever follow what had once been a practice of publishing openly about their models since that would ruin their business model, I mean national security.
Seems like a publicity coup for the frontier companies to me.
chooky
18d ago
This doesn't address the true constraint - financial resources and parent time/attention - at all. Sure, I guess theoretically a husband and wife could pump out more and more babies until they reach a certain age, but the reality is that most families these days have 1-2 kids, and a lot of the reason for this is the financial/time resources needed to have more. A Down's syndrome kid very obviously takes a lot more resources to raise, though it is perhaps a fair point that a great deal of these resources will come from society/taxes (public school or other programs) rather than the family; since a Down's syndrome kid might need a lot less college/etc money than a normal kid, I'm actually not sure I'm willing to take a strong position for the family's finances/attention either way. Possibly, it ends up a wash and comes down to someone choosing between having only one kid (with Down's) or being forced to forego one of the two normal kids they would have. Personally, I would choose the non-Down's choices. I mean, maybe you are thinking of someone with unlimited financial/family resources, in which case fertility/biology is a more reasonable binding constraint, but I think we should obviously think of a typical family for which money actually exists.
chooky
18d ago
Surely any business would welcome their competitor randomly exiting the market. This seems like an unambiguously great piece of luck for a business.
chooky
22d ago
I would totally disagree, and I don't particularly care for any Killers.
I think we can make a reasonable argument that STM's chorus is much better, but the rest of STM is very, very mid. The verse, from a catchiness standpoint, is completely disposable, which is a huge problem because the song takes forever to get to the first chorus. Brightside, on the other hand, opens with a signature guitar melody and then immediately jumps into catchy verse. Even if we acknowledge the lack of actual melody, the rhythm of the Brightside verse is very successful; like many of the best emo-punk songs, it's frequently unclear if the good part of the song is the verse or the chorus (many Paramore songs would be a major example). While the guitar riffs in STM might be better, the synths really drag the song down, and there is, again, no competition with the opening guitar notes of Brightside.
chooky
27d ago
That's funny. I insisted to my IT that they user their admin privilege to install the desktop app so I wouldn't have to use the browser-based!
chooky
1mo ago
And it's increasingly just not relevant for customers. I basically never carry cash unless I have recently had to go get some to send to my kids' school. What need would I ever have to carry hundreds unless I am at a restaurant that charges substantial card fees or dodges taxes?
Final shift employees hate making bank runs, and businesses hate theft risk and working capital costs.
chooky
1mo ago
There are little notches that engage different plates. They are ingenious, but a total nightmare if they break.
chooky
1mo ago
Hmm, are you claiming too much, though? I'm concerned that your standard would not allow for a distinction between the Borderers versus other English groups that emigrated to the US as described in Albion's Seed.
chooky
1mo ago
We called it just Snatch, but yes it was, or at least was very popular as a cool and good movie among college kids interested in such things. In Latin America, it was called something that translates to Pigs and Diamonds.
chooky
1mo ago
For me, the interesting questions were not about looking past the face value of the text but about why this hagiography was undertaken. It's also fairly fun, imo, to read.
chooky
1mo ago
Since the negotiations on ending the conflict thus far have centered on the nuclear question, I see the nuclear issue as the Trump administration's primary motivation, especially given the 2025 strike on an Iranian nuclear facility, Trump ending JCPOA, and because the 2026 war began as the administration seemingly concluded that negotiations on this issue were not going well.
But, sure, this could be wrong - maybe it is a deranged plot between Trump and the Russians after all!
chooky
1mo ago
The stated reason for the war is to prevent Iran from acquiring the leverage of a nuclear bomb. Even once acquired, this is not the greatest leverage given that actually using it is somewhat problematic. Through the war, Iran has gained/discovered/confirmed very powerful conventional leverage in its ability to control the Strait of Hormuz. This is pretty bad! I am not really sure what the off-ramp is.
On the cost of economic disruption and more expensive oil, I would personally say that the various political gains you note in the Middle East are not worth it, especially in the big picture that the US has been weakened relative to China.
I don't contest any of that, and I certainly appreciate that being toxic is clearly the winning strategy for both sides, especially in primaries.
But I would vote for a Romney-like over Hillary or Harris in a heartbeat.
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