ulyssessword
No bio...
User ID: 308
ulyssessword
4mo ago
Suddenly politicians will have an interest in getting new rental housing on the market.
Or simply run in high-population districts that have a high proportion of renters.
The average MP would get about $58k/yr (2 million units * $10 / 343 seats in the upcoming election) from that fee, but some districts are three times as large as others and renting is unequally distributed.
The budget has funding for an additional 131k units by 2031, which is nearly 1% per year. Wow, all that work for a few hundred bucks. It's nearly a third of what you'd need to keep up with inflation.
ulyssessword
4mo ago
If he was incompetent, controlled, deceived, or otherwise making a bad decision.
I agree that there's no good reason, but this theory already requires that he's past his prime.
ulyssessword
4mo ago
I guess he could run as an independent? By my understanding, Biden isn't entitled to the Democratic nomination, so if the party wants him gone, he's gone.
ulyssessword
4mo ago
That's the other half of the statement: I can very easily deny that "Donald Trump tried..." to do that.
He's not a charismatic genius that can manipulate a crowd into doing his bidding with veiled statements and subtle insinuations. He didn't ask for people to storm the capital, so I have a hard time believing that he tried to get people to storm the capital.
ulyssessword
4mo ago
Yes, any possible argument. Ideally, they would have been laughed out of the room for proposing that strategy because it should have no chance of success.
ulyssessword
4mo ago
Can we get that here? Some activists are currently arguing
Jensen said denying trans kids the right to be who they are, or outing them their parents without their consent, could fall under the "cruel and unusual treatment" aspect of Section 12.
about fifteen-year-olds requiring parental consent (and sixteen-year-olds requiring notification but not consent) before the school officially recognizes a name/gender change. (Also, "outing them to their parents" is directly against the written policy, as far as I can tell)
ulyssessword
4mo ago
I suspect it's more effective than one made in the "political cartoon" style, even if nobody would confuse it with a candid photograph.
ulyssessword
4mo ago
takes 5 more steps than it should
Lol, if only it was that good for everything.
Something I ran into literally right now: I wanted to make letter-sized (8.5x11") slides in powerpoint. The process is:
- Change system of measurement to inches (optional):
- Gain inspiration and mysterious clues from their help page.
- Quit powerpoint
- navigate through Control Panel -> Time and Language -> Date, Time and Regional Formatting -> Additional date, time & regional settings -> Region/Change Date, time, or number formats -> Additional Settings -> Measurement System = U. S.
- Change slide size
- View -> Slide Master -> Slide Size -> Custom Slide Size
I have no idea how anyone is supposed to know that the ruler in Powerpoint (but not Word!) is set within the language settings in Windows. Or that you should start at "view" to get formatting options. It feels like they went from "If you don't know something, you shouldn't be afraid to ask for help" to "If our users don't know something, they should be required to ask for our help".
ulyssessword
5mo ago
You're responding to a filtered comment.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
One interesting distinction I've heard is "being ambitious" vs. "having an ambition".
A person who is being ambitious might do well in school, put together a good college application, do well in college, put together a good job application, do well at their job, put together a good promotion application, etc. then end up as a multimillionaire CEO/partner/senator/other-0.01%er. They follow the predefined "ambitious" path, reach elite status, and kind of just do normal stuff.
A person who has an ambition starts with an audacious goal (develop a martian colony, change society on a constitutionally-relevant level, break an Olympic record, etc), organizes their life to achieve that goal, and blasts past obstacles that would stop any reasonable person.
Under that framing, a politician who is running on ambition alone ("being ambitious") would be a person who follows the straight line to power/money/status and ends up in government.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
Before his death: Company is worth 3.86 million dollars.
Literally the one second that you're calculating taxes: Company is worth 6.86 million dollars (or if they had planned properly and did the algebra, 16.78 million)
After his death: Company is worth 3.86 million dollars.
They could have set it up so that some external entity A) held the insurance policy, and B) had the obligation to destroy the shares once obtained. If they had, the second entity would obviously be worth zero dollars (because its assets match its liabilities perfectly) and the normal business would be worth 3.86M throughout.
Or if they had structured it as a survivor's benefit, so that Thomas got the money and the obligation to buy Michael out.
Or, or, or...
The intent was clear. Just let people make agreements without hopping through hoops.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
The IRS, on the other hand, argued that the value should be 6.86 million (the 3.86 million valued before+3 million that was about to be paid out),
Simple, they should've just got a 0.77 * (3 + 3.86) = 5.28 million dollar insurance policy instead, so his estate could get 77% of the value and the business could stay together. Oh wait, then they would need a 0.77 * (5.28 + 3.86) = 7.04 million dollar policy...
Doing the algebra, they should've taken out a 12.92 million dollar policy (plus some extra for the taxes?) so that the business doesn't have to sell anything off while his estate gets 77% of the business. That makes perfect sense. /s
ulyssessword
5mo ago
IIRC female hiring managers have stronger anti-woman biases than male hiring managers do. I wouldn't be surprised if that was true for jurors as well.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
Why is there this special carve out to discriminate against men?
Who cares?
That's a literal question: Which people care about men being discriminated against, how much do they care about it, and what can they do based on those feelings?
Men's Rights activism is a powerless joke, and equal rights activism has died off and been replaced by a dozen individual interest groups. The people that care don't matter, and the people that matter don't care.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
If an algorithmic system is consistent and has limited inputs, then it doesn't really matter if it's completely blackboxed. You can just rerun the analysis with slightly-changed inputs to find what it decides. Hopefully that results in mostly-smooth results on simple categories, but a illegible AI might be more understandable than a lying human regardless.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
I don't want AI making hiring decisions, [...] or deciding verdicts in criminal trials. Anything that helps prevent that (even if imperfect and incomplete) is a good thing in my view.
What's better about a person making those decisions? The criteria I can think of (accuracy, speed, interpretability/legibility, compliance with standards) don't always favor human decisionmakers.
(I don't want anyone monitoring what I write on the internet for wrongthink, so I'm with you there)
ulyssessword
5mo ago
A recent headline here was:
Government delayed [COVID] lockdowns even though it knew the virus was spreading "exponentially"
No shit, that's what viruses do. What's the doubling time? What are the current conditions? What do those data points say about the near-term future?
ulyssessword
5mo ago
Yup, as happened in 2006, 2008, 2011, and 2021. It's not a rare event, it just never lined up perfectly before now.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
Six years is a term and a half under normal circumstances. Trudeau called an election mid-pandemic (when he was only two years into the four year term) because he (correctly) thought he was at peak popularity at that time. If that election hadn't happened and nothing else had changed, we would have been half a year into a Conservative majority, so good call, I guess.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
Presidential Ballot Access: Ohio Edition
Semi-related: The date of the upcoming Canadian federal election.
By statute, Canadian elections are held on the third Monday of October, unless they aren't. Also, MPs only get a pension if they serve for six years. The problem? The third Monday of October 2019 (two elections ago) was the 21st, and the third Monday of October 2025 will be the 20th. The ruling Liberal party has put forward a bill to push it back by a week , to "not conflict with Diwali". Of course, 22 Liberal (and 58 other) members reaching eligibility would have nothing to do with that, particularly when the Liberals are expected to lose a devastating amount of seats.
Why didn't they see this coming in 2007, when they set the fixed dates? The pension rule was already 22 years old at that point, so it's not like it was unforeseeable.
ulyssessword
5mo ago
Last I heard, it was because black women chose black obstetricians, and being in a situation where you give birth with a doctor other than your first choice indicated some sort of problem (usually, complications that required a non-racially-filtered specialist).
It's also why home births are so safe in some studies: if they become dangerous, they become hospital births.
ulyssessword
6mo ago
How about a "right to retreat"? If you decide to leave and there isn't a safe route, that's the blockade's fault. They're still free to block the road, but they can't surround and attack vehicles.
ulyssessword
6mo ago
Alright, so what would be a “good sign”?
Assuming that the evidence was genuinely unclear...
Communicate that in an unambiguous way, and find him not guilty. If necessary, explain the presumption of innocence and lay out exactly how and why the evidence was insufficient to convict him. That's how the system should work with genuinely unclear evidence.
Instead, he was found guilty, the rationale was not communicated clearly and effectively, and there isn't even agreement over how it should be judged.
ulyssessword
6mo ago
What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues.
The Guardian (Like the New York Times before it), was exercising its right to kick people in the balls:
suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I’m gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don’t want to make anyone unsafe , so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they’ll hold off...
No! There’s no dignified way to answer any of these questions except “fuck you”. Just don’t kick me in the balls! It isn’t rocket science! Don’t kick me in the fucking balls!
In the New York Times’ worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the right to remain anonymous by proving I’m the perfect sympathetic victim who satisfies all their criteria of victimhood. But in my worldview, I start with the right to anonymity, and they need to make an affirmative case for doxxing me.
And yet it is a story, and a story that gets me emotionally invested,
It is a story. It has plot, characters, setting, conflict, and all the rest. It just isn't news.
They've pulled a great trick: they (often) write newsworthy stories, therefore (all) stories they write are newsworthy. Heck, they're even called "the news", so anything they see fit to print must be real news.
I haven't mailed anything in years, and I haven't mailed an actual letter in decades.
I'm struggling to think of when I last received a valuable piece of mail (instead of just paper copies of bills and advertisements). It might have been some Christmas cards from pre-pandemic times.
More options
Context Copy link