stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
2d ago
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drums. Curtains.
stuckinbathroom
3d ago
Her parents are dentists, that’s all I remember about them
stuckinbathroom
3d ago
weasels and malfoys were the two types of old money with no money
Uh, since when did the Malfoys have no money? They were famously generationally wealthy, as evidenced by Lucius Malfoy purchasing a new Nimbus 2001 for each member of the Slytherin Quidditch team in Chamber of Secrets
I’m utterly baffled; what could “sigma” possibly mean in this context? Usually “epsilon” is the mathematician’s Greek letter of choice to denote very small quantities.
stuckinbathroom
7d ago
stuckinbathroom
8d ago
Great point, and one which I didn’t consider. The model I was going off of was Singapore, which famously compensates its bureaucrats quite well both in terms of money and prestige. The government even pays for top students to attend elite universities in the US/UK, but with the requirement that those students come back and work in the civil service for a period of time, or else be on the hook for the tuition bill.
The opportunity cost of such elite human capital going to work for the government is probably not that huge, as measured by the impact on Singaporean gross domestic product: the cream of the crop can certainly generate much more value in the private sector, but in almost all cases, making boatloads of cash requires employment abroad and hence not contributing to Singapore’s GDP. Indeed, it’s not unheard of for FAANG to buy top-notch Singaporean Stanford/Harvard/MIT CS grads out of their tuition bonds with the government, so that they can stay and work in the US (and while it’s true that some tech giants have a presence in Singapore, it’s almost invariably an Asia sales office without any serious product/engineering work going on).
By contrast, the US has a much deeper pool of high-paying, high-prestige jobs within the country that our hypothetical elite government employment scheme would compete with/crowd out.
stuckinbathroom
8d ago
Frankly even the pay might be a tough sell: if we’re looking to slash wasteful spending, why would we pay bureaucrats even more?
(Yes, yes, I’m aware that the goal is to hire talented bureaucrats who will use their prodigious skills to bring government closer to private-sector levels of efficiency and productivity and thus more than make up for their higher salaries. But it’s hard to get buy-in from the public, especially the Red Tribe, on such second-order concerns)
stuckinbathroom
10d ago
median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer.
I’m not following… absent some additional assumptions (e.g., that the median income in your town is initially >= top 10% income for the US), how does inviting people who make less than the top 10% make your town poorer? The part about the top 10% of taxpayers providing 70% of tax receipts seems irrelevant.
stuckinbathroom
10d ago
Personally this is starting to make me want future Democrat wins, but not because I believe in the Democrats. If the dems win, my life mostly stays the same. If the Republicans win, my life gets worse just because people around me can't deal with it.
See also: Danegeld, negotiating with terrorists
stuckinbathroom
11d ago
Christians are essentially slightly misguided Muslims who Allah will save anyway
I’m intrigued; is this claim endorsed by any prominent mainstream Islamic theologians?
AFAIK, the sole requirement for conversion to Islam is sincerely believing in the Shahada, viz. that there is only one God and Muhammad is his messenger. Do Christians get partial credit for believing the first half? If so, what about Jews?
stuckinbathroom
15d ago
Ah yeah, I forgot about that guy. Good point; I stand corrected
stuckinbathroom
15d ago
The Harris campaign let those people exercise veto power over their VP pick
Uh, when has Walz ever openly opposed Kamala on support for Israel? Wasn’t he boldly (some would say falsely) proclaiming his military background/support for the global American empire?
stuckinbathroom
16d ago
Personally my preferred solution is to repeal the laws against non-citizen voting
…
Having a category of residents that don't get to vote is undemocratic
Why do you think so?
I agree that having a class of legal residents who can never earn the right to vote would be undemocratic. However, this sounds like an argument for a faster pathway to citizenship, or perhaps some non-citizen permanent resident status that comes with voting rights, if you like.
But why should persons who have not put down roots in the US, or who have not otherwise meaningfully contributed to the fabric of our society in some way*, have a say in the long-term future of our country?
You may object that there are 18-year-old citizens who vote without having permanently settled anywhere. To this I would say, does our 18-year-old citizen voter have a US citizen parent?
If yes, I would say that my ideal model of US citizenship—which, to be sure, differs from the reality—is that in exchange for the aforementioned “contribution to the fabric of our society”, the social contract grants to each citizen and his descendants in perpetuity a presumptive right to a say in our nation’s future, in the absence of a compelling reason to the contrary (such as a felony conviction or naturalization in another polity).
If no, now you understand the case against birthright citizenship.
*Reasonable people can disagree on this matter, but examples of such might be: military service, or running businesses which gainfully employ individuals in economically deprived areas.
stuckinbathroom
16d ago
40K damaged, incomplete voter registration forms submitted in Maricopa County
When I read this headline, my first thought was that the registration forms had been corrupted by Chaos.
Anyway, I hope the voting machine spirits are adequately appeased by the ritual sacrifice of ballots, lest we end up with more hanging chads. Praise the Electomnissiah.
stuckinbathroom
16d ago
definition of evidence is "B s.t. P(B|A)/P(B) > 0".
Wouldn’t the definition of “A is Bayesian evidence of B” be “P(B|A) > P(B)”
stuckinbathroom
17d ago
A case of Brog assimilation, so to speak
stuckinbathroom
17d ago
“Barack” sounds suspiciously Middle Eastern.
FWIW prior to Obama’s presidential campaign, probably the best-known “Barack” (by American English pronunciation, not spelling) was Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel and Labor Party leader. He is indeed Middle Eastern, but seeing as he’s an Israeli Jew, I would hardly say “suspiciously” so.
stuckinbathroom
21d ago
IIRC the death penalty still retains majority approval in many countries around the world, even those where it has been abolished. It’s not a case of “the entire world” forgetting, so much as it is the Western ruling classes forgetting. This, I suspect, can be ascribed to the ruling class living in ever more of a low-crime, high-trust bubble as compared to the common rabble.
stuckinbathroom
22d ago
Precisely. The female equivalent of Reddit, on the other hand, is Pinterest
stuckinbathroom
22d ago
The grim irony in Israel doing it should not be lost on anyone.
In the grim darkness of the Middle East, there is only war.
(I say this half-jokingly, but only half)
stuckinbathroom
23d ago
Scary indeed, but for the sake of completeness, let’s wargame the putative fraudster’s next steps.
Plan A: Pick up a bunch of mail-in ballots from the county clerk, fill them in with the details of the “voters” whom you have fraudulently registered, and mail them in/drop them off. This plan hinges on the ability to collect an arbitrary number of blank mail-in ballots: if ballots are (for example) only mailed to the address of registration, this plan is a no-go. Does anyone know if this is the case in PA?
Plan B: On Election Day (or during the ~2 weeks prior, if early voting is a thing), hit up a bunch of different polling stations and vote multiple times, posing as a different fraudulently-registered voter each time. Obviously this is much easier in the absence of mandatory voter ID. Also, if the voter you are impersonating actually registers and votes (perhaps on the same day, in places where that is allowed—again, PA?), you risk blowing the whole operation.
I don’t mean to suggest that the potential failure modes of such a scheme mean that potential voter fraud is no big deal—it absolutely is. But simply fraudulently registering voters is only one piece of the overall theft of an election. Vigilance at other stages of the process can, in theory, head off obvious cases of fraud.
Then again, the fact that these false registrations were so sophisticated and were only caught so late in the game should perhaps be Bayesian evidence of just how much “vigilance” actually exists in practice.
stuckinbathroom
24d ago
I used to joke with my wife
Why did you stop? (Alternatively, hey Mitch, didn’t expect to run into you here!)
stuckinbathroom
25d ago
the Queen's English
I’ve got some bad news for ya bud…
(Well I suppose you didn’t specify the Queen Regnant’s English so…)
stuckinbathroom
29d ago
I wonder if Rohan has agreed to interview Trump
“Gandalf says I am not fit to be King of Gondor but is fine with Broken-Toe Aragorn. Truth is Dopey Gandalf is just a Second-Rate wizard who couldn’t even defeat a Balrog! Should lay off the Longbottom Leaf. SAD!”
Sadly relevant The Oatmeal
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