ulyssessword
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User ID: 308
ulyssessword
21hr ago
If the most right-wing examples you can think of literally contain more left-wingers than right- (such as Charlottesville, if you include counter-protesters), then I'm comfortable calling them less vulnerable.
ulyssessword
1d ago
Sure, if you could find any. And if the Democrats got into a deporting-immigrants mood. And they had publicized their views enough. And...
ulyssessword
1d ago
How far can it stretch before it stops being "this weapon", and shifts to being a different one? If the standard is "...her[/his] presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda.", then campus protesters (or rally organizers, or similar) are pretty much the only valid targets.
The right-wing base doesn't generally shout their opinions from a soapbox in the same way, and therefore isn't as vulnerable to this.
ulyssessword
2d ago
I think they're referring to the general disdain at the root of Liberal decisions. I can't point to any explicitly discriminatory laws, but the differences in impact are pretty clear.
- COVID vaccines were distributed to the provinces proportional to (total) population. The Federal government is responsible for providing healthcare to Treaty Indians, while Provincial governments are responsible for providing healthcare to the rest of their residents. The feds assigned a larger-than-proportional number of the doses to go to them (which is probably appropriate given the risk factors) from their province's stock, and as a result non-Native Manitobans got worse access than non-Native Ontarians due to that province's larger Native population.
- They wanted to increase affordability, so they cut the carbon tax for some home heating. Specifically, for home heating oil which is (almost) exclusively used in the East, while the West uses natural gas. When asked about it, a Liberal MP said that Westerners should elect more Liberals if they want to benefit from the government. This is the clearest example IMO. (Saskatchewan decided that it wanted that tax exemption too, so it stopped collecting/paying the carbon tax on all home heating. I just checked and haven't seen any news about it since then, so it sounds like it worked.)
- Equalization payments are above 100% of "equal" because the Liberals maintained a Harper-era law that reduced equalization amounts (at the time. Then circumstances changed and the formula gives a different result). Instead of the "have" provinces mostly in the West bringing the "have-not" provinces up to their own level of economic prosperity and services, they're forced to push them above their own levels by a few billion dollars.
ulyssessword
4d ago
We already did state-run education and it resulted in...
Did switching to a central system change those results?
ulyssessword
6d ago
How does my saying that it is Good, Actually imply that it's terrible?
I read "Good, Actually" as inherently sarcastic, kind of like "cool story, bro" doesn't mean that the story is cool, or that they're a bro.
I have no idea why I believe that, though.
ulyssessword
6d ago
Then it's not so much "Nobody carries around..." as "There is nothing that could be carried for...". That seems like a bigger problem.
ulyssessword
6d ago
That proves that you were...when it was issued, it doesn't mean you are one now.
Isn't that an impossibly high standard?
Like, you can prove that you were issued a driver's license, but you can't prove that you have a valid one now. I'm sure there's a way around that issue.
ulyssessword
7d ago
It has to have at least one flaw. There is a crack in everything.
ulyssessword
7d ago
Unfortunately it’s a lot easier to let people in than kick them out.
Well, shucks. Guess it's best to just give up completely, then. /s
If it's hard, then that just means it takes more work. Might as well get started now.
ulyssessword
7d ago
Yeah I just don’t think these petty deportations are good politics though.
Highly-publicized deportations seem like meat for the base, and also serve as a chilling effect for illegal immigrants. It's also a wedge issue where the Right gets to paint the Left as opposing the Rule of Law.
There are 10+M immigrants under Biden...
I don't see any reason to deport immigrants who applied and were accepted. At worst, the government could stop approving new applications and let any existing temporary ones expire without renewal.
Immigrants who commit normal crimes (like murder) or break immigration law should be deported and/or punished in other ways. Just like anyone else.
Next Dem president likely to let 20M in next round, at this rate…
That sounds like a call to deport 20M extra so that the immigrant numbers are at the right level at the end of their term. (jk?)
ulyssessword
7d ago
I don't think "fake it 'til you make it" is a very good basis for a legal system. Continuously breaking the law for years is worse than breaking it for days, all else being equal.
ulyssessword
7d ago
an independent nonprofit...fired last week by the Trump administration.
What? If they're independent, why didn't they laugh off his powerless bluster and stay on the job? That's what I would do if Trump told me I was fired.
If he has the power to fire them, he probably has the power to access the building. I find it suspicious that they aren't debating the first point.
ulyssessword
7d ago
Currently, he can talk about anything he knows or suspects. After the gag order, he wouldn't be able to talk about the entire topic. This is because lawyers are smart enough to not fall for this trick from SSC:
Your best bet is to call every psychiatric hospital that they could plausibly be in and ask “Is [PERSON’S NAME] there?” Sometimes, all except one of them will say “No”, and one of them will say “Due to medical privacy laws, we can’t tell you”. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it really works.
See this editorial for a more in-depth explanation:
But the reasoning was hardly nefarious. It was because receiving such briefings would have circumscribed what Poilievre could say about Chinese interference, a point on which everyone agrees. As the leader of the Opposition, Poilievre believed, reasonably I would say, that any briefing offered would be used as a way for the government to get him to stop criticizing it over its lax attitude to election security.
ulyssessword
8d ago
In my experience, you could always convert a picture into a .pdf, but faithfully and easily converting a physical page into a properly formatted, clear .pdf is a much more recent innovation.
ulyssessword
8d ago
I've been seeing that style of argument pop up a few times lately, and it never fails to annoy me.
The general form is:
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Alice: I believe X because [strong argument A], [strong argument B], [strong argument C], and [supporting/trivial argument D].
-
Bob: Why does Alice think argument D is sufficient on its own? It's clearly trivial.
See also: "Why doesn't Pierre Poilievre get his security clearance?" (because the government has tied a gag order to the briefing. If he accepted under the current terms, he couldn't be an effective leader of the opposition.)
ulyssessword
9d ago
I'm not familiar with that model (I just found it by searching), but I wouldn't doubt if they were simply Goodhearting their way into some flashy claims.
One thing to keep in mind is that these models are the worst they'll ever be. Give it a year or so and someone (either one of the big companies or someone building off their work) will release a model with both early-2025 level quality and >=100M context.
ulyssessword
9d ago
I know that context windows continue to be able to be expanded regularly - but AI ain't gonna be able to take over the world or even my job if it can't watch the entire Star Wars trilogy in one sitting.
I just checked, and the current leader has 100 million tokens ("equivalent to 750 novels"), while non-specialized models are in the 100k-1M range. You're going to have to update your arguments (then update them again in a few months when AIs meet your new standards, then update them again...).
ulyssessword
10d ago
In many cities it is as fast if not faster.
Which cities?
I just checked my daily commute, and I'd have to leave an hour earlier and get home 45 minutes later if I had to take the bus. I could cut that down to half an hour each if my boss let me change my shift to match the busses, but that's still an hour a day on top of getting that accommodation.
Also for most things people don't need public transit, a short walk is faster than being stuck in a car.
A short drive is faster than a short walk. I've driven to the store literally 400 meters away (280 m as the crow flies) because I was in a rush and driving is faster than running.
You can criticize me for my poor planning, but I confirmed that it was faster by timing my next few trips. It wasn't a lazy misconception or a naive assumption.
The mindset of a car being convient because it allows people to travel far comes from people living in a dead suburb.
That's literally the majority of Americans, so I'm not sure where you're going with that. Are you saying they have a distorted mindset and are factually incorrect? That it's true for them (due to their bad circumstances), but the idea has spread to people it doesn't apply to? Is it a moral judgment?
ulyssessword
10d ago
then surely "let's put mentally ill drug addicts in rehab programs against their will so they don't piss or stab people on the subway" is back on the table?
That would be logical, but logic doesn't have much power in the culture wars. Have you seen any evidence that's actually the case?
ulyssessword
10d ago
I occasionally visit my parents for brunch.
How would you recommend I exercise my supposedly-increased freedom to travel without a car if I wanted to make a 100 km trip to a rural location that isn't on the route between two cities?
IIRC, some other country gives their failing students a grade of "6" and the myth started when someone didn't realize foreign standards were different and mistook his top grade for failure.
ulyssessword
12d ago
Is it really that bad that 25% of students get individualized coaching? The IQ spread between a student with an IQ of 70 and one with an IQ of 130+ is far too great to teach them together.
That explains five percentage points and assumes that half of "special education programs" are for gifted children.
If you want to map it to one tail of IQ, then 25% of students have <90 IQ. I don't think that the typical student with an IQ of 89 needs coaching, so something else is causing those numbers.
ulyssessword
13d ago
...it means I now receive less resources for the same amount...
...and therefore, anything outside of my monopoly is an infringement on my rights, and should be banned.
I'm mostly with MathWizard here. The treatment of sex violates those general rules. Unlike him, I can see a few reasons why they should be an exception, but I'm still not sure if they're sufficient reasons.
We're reading a news article. One from the New York Times no less. Who's to say that there wasn't criminality at the root of this case?
The New York Times and SecureSignals, who are selecting what you see here, did not focus on that because it doesn't make a good story.
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