chooky
1d ago
I understand this - what is not clear to me is if OP would accept this definition of woman being given access to ladies' restrooms. They seem to want only "buologically female", but it is not clear to me if that means "female at birth" or more like "post-op".
chooky
2d ago
This is getting at one of my questions for the OP - what exactly is meant by "biological" and "trans"?
To me, an MtF "woman" lacks a penis and testicles. Does the calculus change if that is what "trans" means? In general, I am pretty much of the opinion that this is not an area in which the government should get involved, thougb I am grateful for an effect of previous bathroom controversies being that most restaurants and bars changed to genderless bathrooms, making it more likely that there won't be a line. However, lacking a penis seems like a reasonable standard for someone being allowed entry into the women's bathroom regardless of sex at birth.
chooky
2d ago
I think its more that they erred horribly by trying to make Messenger standalone instead of keeping Facebook messages effortless and having messages by a draw to keep young people on facebook.
chooky
3d ago
But this isnt the situation Russia faced! If the missiles are headed for your nukes and will seriously debilitate your retaliation ability, maybe we are talking.
One thing that I think you are making a strong argument for is that countries which have only a mofest amount of nukes may behave dangerously because it is easier for them to believe their retaliation ability is being eliminated.
chooky
4d ago
I'm not sure the red line argument here is very compelling. Are we supposed to believe that Russia is going to nuke the Ukraine or attempt to nuke other US allies because the US gave Ukraine missiles to strike Russian military targets with?
Were a red line to have been advertised, the game theory error here wouls be Putin's because his threat of escalating all the way to nukes would have been implausible. It is like if a parent tells their kids that they are going to cancel Christmas knowing that they would never actually do so. I terrified my kid one time by not telling them I would cancel Halloween if they misbehaved again, which they knew I would not do, but by telling them I would inmediately confiscate all their candy, which they knew I would be happy to do for dental/health reasons. Your threat has to be one that the other side believes you would follow through on, and nuke escalation except in response to nukes is generally not that.
chooky
9d ago
I dont think that was supposed to be Rov_scam's voice; rather, they were telling the hypothetical story of how AOC would sell the position shift.
chooky
14d ago
This data on US wages doesnt really match what the US numbers show. Real wage growth was slower under Biden than Trump, but definitely was positive in 2023 (perhaps not on 2022 but only as an artifact of stimulus). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q#0
chooky
14d ago
What's the world in which Putin wins the prize for stopping the war that began as an invasion he ordered? Do aggressors usually get the prize along with resistors? (I mean, honestly, it seens weird for people on either side of a war to win a peace prize .)
chooky
14d ago
Looking at the abortion ballot results at a state level, proposing abortion legislation at the federal level seems like obvious suicide for the Republican party.
chooky
29d ago
Imo, the port strike would have been the October surprise since the dockworkers seemed pretty crazy, but it got resolved too quickly for people to even run lut of bananas.
chooky
1mo ago
I think that many politicians rarely genuinely hold any position. They research and float various positions, hoping to find ones that resound with voters and then lean into those positions. Previously in her career, Harris did well with some of these more progressive positions, partly because she began in Cali, partly because Obama/Biden were claiming the middle, partly because of her starting diversity hand and partly because progressives were an ascendant influence. Now, she needs to move to the middle and is. Not every Dem national candidate is going to be a southern governor like Clinton, but probably all candidates are going to adapt like Clinton.
chooky
3mo ago
No way. 3BP's dominance of sci fi was total. It would have taken the prize against almost anything.
chooky
3mo ago
The fact that we don't means-test, which seems like such an obviously correct and non-controversial idea, is indicative of just how much of a third rail any meaningful cuts to SS are due to the old people voting bloc. Even though it is kind of crazy to oppose making it so that you don't collect SS if you are fabulously wealthy, the topic is like other third rails (guns, abortion) in that even reasonable changes are vehemently opposed. Unlike guns and abortion, though, you are probably not going to get the SC to intervene here, so the only possible approach is legislative. The "adults" from both parties need to get together and get real about SS, publicly contradicting party leaders who attempt to make the issue partisan, and see if they can't at least manage to means-test for the sake of the grandchildren. The Ponzi scheme doesn't have to go to zero - we just need to start cutting benefits as the current level becomes unsustainable. Perhaps another solution would be to embrace more official, non-citizen immigration so that we can have a bigger cadre of workers who pay into SS but never get to withdraw.
chooky
4mo ago
Something that may give you hope is that while I have an extreme aesthetic aversion to Trump, I will need Harris to run very very far away from her 2016 tax and financial platform to not consider voting with my wallet. I learned during Trump's first term that the sky would not fall, and Biden certainly failed to be the Obama redux I thought I was voting for. I suspect that more of my white collar, blue tribe cohort will be of a similar mind than you fear or Dems appreciate. Given the layoffs in tech and so forth, I also think that Dem efforts to talk up the Biden job market (which overheated and gave way to inflation, so thanks? a sin for both parties on this one thougb) will fall on somewhat deaf ears for the upper middle white collar workers.
chooky
4mo ago
What made you choose Circe over Song of Achilles? I have only read the latter, which was published first (and thus is the true beginning of this genre), and I found it completely amazing.
chooky
4mo ago
Does this mean that all special prosecutions over the past few decades are also viewed as illegitimate?
chooky
5mo ago
Walking a pleasant street to necessities is not easy to achieve in suburbia.
chooky
7mo ago
Why would this make you specifically racist? To me, this outcome is likely more driven by cultural/racial homogeneity than this homogeneity being of a certain race or not.
chooky
8mo ago
The discussions of HBO on here often make me feel like I am watching a different network. Euphoria has lots of sex and is a great show. White Lotus, particularly season 2, has plenty of sex and is good. In my view, the are the 2 best shows that HBO has made in a very long time, and The Idol, execrable as what I watched of it was, had lots and lots of sexualized scenes.
chooky
8mo ago
It may be that I am consuming a lot of mainstream media uncritically, but I am under the impression that the KKK and so forth did a great deal of damage to American blacks creating economic centers - for example, the Tulsa Massacre.
chooky
9mo ago
I have seen several mainstream articles discussing the show's shortcomings (e.g., Slate, NYMag, Ringer). Whatever the showrunner says, it doesn't seem like anyone really thinks the back half of the show was any good. The RT critics/audience disconnect seems to me like it is more an artifact of critics' scores usually being based on the first couple episodes.
chooky
10mo ago
To be honest, the base LLM-style AI seems far more reliant on "what humans already know" than augmenting it with some math laws. The former seems like a move closer to a truly thinking AI rather than one that just predicts what an answer would be without any kind of logic behind it.
chooky
10mo ago
Dune 1 is considered a true SF classic. If you liked 1, Book 2 is okay, tbough I'm not sure it adds a great deal that isn't implied by Book 1. Book 3 is not great and worth reading mostly as setup for Book 4 (God Emperor), which is a wild book that is worth getting to. Book 5 is pretty skippable and comes after a huge timeskip, so it is completely unnecessary to hitting the genre peaks of 1 and 4.
Why must a successful person have explicit strategies? I can think of a lot of works of literature with very coherent meaning that the author does not seem to have explicitly intended. Rather, the author seems to be so in tune with the fictional characters and world that the result cannot help but have depth. Why not also a gifted politician? To me, it seems more likely that the superficially haphazard approach to appointments is driven by Trump's talent for identifying and tapping into the zeitgeist, not a detailed dive into the specifics, though I don't doubt that some of the people close to Trump (eg Musk) do seem to have some sort of master plan.
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