Presumably this will also put pressure on Canada as a whole to produce a government that is capable of acceding to Trump's demands, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of his goals. If the current Cathedral bureaucracy churning along in Canada isn't going to deign to respond to someone they see as the next coming of Hitler, they can be presented with an economic collapse and associated angry mobs until they change their mind and/or are replaced.
Honestly, that might be kind of a clever approach to it: present incredibly reasonable demands like coordinating with the US's DEA on whatever fentanyl is flowing over the border, when you're ignored implement the tariffs, then when blamed for the resulting economic collapse point out the incredibly straightforward requests you had that anyone should be fine going along with. Exacerbates existing concerns with the faceless/motionless government, requires your opponents to take a pro-fentanyl stance, and hopefully resolves itself quickly enough to not do major economic damage to the US.
Musing a little further, I wonder if this is why Trump is cutting out government spending early on: he sees tariffs as a temporary financial shock that will cripple the other nations far faster than they'll cripple the US. Cut out a bunch of spending, use the resulting funds to shore up everything until your international counterpart caves, then when you need to re-add all the essential spending that would be an issue to cut out for too long, the tariffs are already back in the toolbox and the resulting economic hit was entirely hidden.
wraelk
20d ago
While it's entirely possible Trump is absolutely excited to apply tariffs all around, my perception is that for Canada and Mexico his goals are more to use it as a "big stick" to get them in line with his goals: "your entire economy depends on us and I have the power to ruin you, so here's what I want you to do", like how he used it as a threat with the Colombian president refusing deportation flights
Canada's economic interaction with the US doesn't seem to be harmful in terms of the US's long-term economic success: "you send us oil, we refine it and sell it back to you" is actually a pretty good setup for the US. If anything, it seems to paint the Canada-US relationship similarly to the US-China relationship, where not building domestic industrial capacity leaves the former dependent on the latter.
The question then becomes whether Canada will cave sufficiently to Trump's desires, and I can see there being some pain there: Canada's tended to frame itself as "the US, but properly enlightened" and I expect that will lead to some #RESIST and trying to get Trump to cave first, and I'm reasonably confident Trump will actually pull the trigger if it comes to it.
wraelk
26d ago
My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots, even bots designed as a perfect challenge, and if there were no rankings.
I played Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's League equivalent, for a few years and I actually played entirely against bots: I really enjoyed the mechanics of MOBA games and the minute-to-minute gameplay, but I didn't want to deal with the toxicity that seems an inevitable part of those games and I didn't want to be in the endless "gotta get better" spiral that comes with skill-based matchmaking.
On the broader point, there are loads of games that are made entirely for single-player experiences, and while sometimes you get into a community discussing it there's no need to do that. I actually quit the Factorio subreddit around the time the expansion came out because I didn't want the game solved for me, and now only dip back when I'm in the mood to collect a set of random tips, I certainly don't post there for my own social validation. And while I do have friends that play Factorio now, that wasn't the case for many years.
It's pretty clear that we're saved by the father drawing us (see e.g. John 6:46 and surrounding), and it's by belief (same area, also John 3:16).
This is a good point, and I'm a little annoyed at myself for forgetting arguably the most quoted bible verse.
I'll note that John kind of goes off in a very different direction than the rest of the Gospels and that casts some suspicion, but that inevitably descends into a haze of "what did Jesus actually say/do" that gets us nowhere. I'm not nearly a good enough theological scholar to usefully continue here, I'm afraid.
I appreciate the discussion!
Perhaps you're excepting John, but it's pretty clear in John.
I do think John deviates a bit from the other three to a suspicious extent, but what specifically are you talking about? I poked around in there but I didn't see anything that was particularly clear on salvation through grace.
Jesus also forgives sins in the gospels.
Sure, but there's a big difference between "I forgive this particular act" and "mere belief in me automatically erases all acts"
I don't think Jesus actually intended every person to do every thing he spoke of. For example, he probably didn't intend for everyone to be gauging out their eyes.
Sure, maybe he's being metaphorical with some of this, but "he actually meant this unrelated and almost directly contradictory thing" should at least raise some eyebrows.
"And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell." probably doesn't mean "don't worry about it, your sins don't matter as long as you believe"
wraelk
1mo ago
For example, the idea of salvation through grace isn't really something Jesus really talked much about himself, that's mostly a creation of post Gospel books.
When Jesus talked about getting into heaven, he was pretty consistently telling people to do specific things to make it in: sell all your possessions, give up your life to follow him, help the poor.
The idea that just believing in him would guarantee you a place in heaven regardless of your actions was basically all added after.
wraelk
2mo ago
Or make the whole thing more direct and don't provide loans that are statistically unlikely to be repaid.
wraelk
3mo ago
Like everything else unpleasant in society, this is downstream of modern gaming matchmaking.
When you're spending hours in a specific server going back and forth with someone, or playing with your own friends, the behavior isn't bad because you've built up a relationship. It's not a big deal to insult someone because somewhere in the next hour they'll land a good shot on you and can have any bad feeling erased with catharsis at your outraged stream of profanity. And both of you can be honest with your feelings rather than bottling them up.
When you're in a skill-based zero-player-choice matchmaking world where you interact with any given person for 20 minutes tops before they disappear into the endless sea of players, there's no time to develop that relationship and it's just a stream of unrelated people yelling awful things at you.
wraelk
3mo ago
Meanwhile, a rapist who kills his victims won't pass on his genes either.
Well, he won't pass on his genes with that woman. Even assuming that he never finds a woman who offers little enough resistance to leave alive, he could still have children in a consensual relationship separate from the rape.
wraelk
4mo ago
I love these news roundups: a lot of these things weren't on my radar, and I appreciate you bringing them to my attention.
A dispute in Nigeria seems small scale now but in the worst case scenario could snowball into a civil war. Details are unclear but the dispute seems between the central government of Nigeria, controlled by one party, and the governorate of an oil rich region, controlled by another.
I wonder if there are common triggers for civil wars vs just political disputes? My impression is that these things are happening all the time in Africa, but also that civil wars are happening all the time in Africa, so I guess that makes sense.
wraelk
5mo ago
the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault.
Doesn't this start having issues if judges have different levels of leniency for different demographics of offenders, or other confounders that vary between demographics (like age or wealth)?
I think you'd want to instead do it by the average sentence length for the crime they were convicted of, regardless of what they were actually sentenced to. That should eliminate the confounders while maintaining a relative scoring that roughly maps to society's view of the crimes' severity.
If you're worried that those numbers don't match up, that there are crimes that carry a sentence of 5 years but no one's ever given more than 6 months, you could instead use the average actually-given sentence length for all people convicted of that crime.
wraelk
6mo ago
Saudi Arabia apparently did something similar with their foreign-investment oil company, although they bought it out rather than force a contractual handover.
Instead, the Sauds executed a patient, and most importantly, amicable assertion of power over Aramco, which did not become fully owned by Saudis until 1974. At the very start of Aramco, the company was entirely owned and operated by Americans aside from menial labor. However, the Saudi government inserted a clause into their contract with the corporation requiring the American oil men to train Saudi citizens for management and engineering jobs. The Americans held up their end of the bargain, and over time, more and more Saudis took over management and technical positions. This steadily increased the bargaining power of the Saudi government, which periodically renegotiated its contract with the Americans over decades to get a greater share of the profits in exchange for more oil exploration or diplomatic concessions.
In 1973 and 1974, the Saudi government authorized two big final buy-outs of Aramco. The prices were not disclosed publicly, but the consensus is that the American oil companies were well-compensated, and that’s after they had made enormous profits for 30 years. This left the oil companies on good terms with the Saudis who were happy to employ them as consultants and specialists. Today, 80% of Aramco’s employees are Saudi, as well as all executives, though surprisingly not all board members.
(From https://mattlakeman.org/2022/11/22/notes-on-saudi-arabia/)
Well, that's depressing.
So @PmMeClassicMemes, it looks like the text you linked to didn't actually go anywhere: the House passed it unanimously, then the Senate overwrote the bill with something completely different. I checked a couple of the legislators and it looks like Democrats voted to overwrite it and Republicans voted against it: it would not surprise me if the House Democrats who voted for the bill initially were aware this was going to happen.
We're left with the law essentially the same as what we were originally discussing, and the next amendment to that section, rather than clearing up the confusion, makes sure we're aware that someone can be attracted to genderqueer or androgynous people.
I'll continue to stand behind my original points.
wraelk
6mo ago
I don't think you have the right law, you want https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/363A.03.
But it also doesn't have the pedophilia clause, and has additional wording that isn't in either revision:
A person may be attracted to men, women, both, neither, or to people who are genderqueer, androgynous, or have other gender identities.
If you look in the revisions you can see that there's only been one revision to that section in 2023, but it doesn't use the new language.
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/bill.php?b=house&f=hf447&ssn=0&y=2023 is the bill, and if you look at the current bill text, that text is not in it: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF447&type=bill&version=3&session=ls93&session_year=2023&session_number=0 . In fact, very little of the text is in it.
it looks like it was removed after the second version: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF447&version=2&session=ls93&session_year=2023&session_number=0
As best I can tell, once it got to the Senate they just completely rewrote the bill? https://www.senate.mn/journals/2023-2024/20230522077.pdf#page=824, if I'm understanding this correctly they just amended the bill to delete everything past "this will take effect" and wrote their own bill, which seems unbelievable, but... the bill passed, the text isn't changed, and the latest revision of the bill has the text they changed it to.
wraelk
6mo ago
But what's the alternative? The guy whose entire thing is talking about how safe the V22 is faked his own death in a v22 crash to... undermine his own points?
I guess he could be trying to blunt the effect of the v22 crash by making it personal to the point that people can't bring it up, but... a single crash was going to destroy his argument so fully that he's committing to forever pretending to be his own wife (and having to repeatedly bring up the crash again and again in context) as a result of this? He can't just point out that "safe" is not "infinitely safe"?
The Internet's just weird.
wraelk
6mo ago
I'm just a little skeptical that out of all the potential redundancies in the legal code, they went after this one, particularly when "is pedophilia a sexuality" is the kind of thing that is actually up for debate. The legal code is not trying to minimize word count, and while I could see a case for not putting the exemption in in the first place, I don't see a reason to remove it once it's in there, unless you actually care about the effect
And the person who introduced the bill is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Finke, a poorly-passing MTF who seems a lot more motivated by trans ideology than systematic optimization of the legal code.
wraelk
6mo ago
That seems like what the original wording that was removed in the redefinition Walz signed, "Sexual orientation does not include a physical or sexual attachment to children by an adult" would imply?
If someone was a bisexual pedophile, I would expect discrimination against them based on their bisexuality to be prohibited, but discrimination against them based on their pedophilia to not be prohibited. So I'd want to clarify in law that pedophilia is not a sexual orientation for the purpose of discrimination law. That seems like exactly what the pre-revision wording does.
wraelk
6mo ago
Tacticool catalogues have spears that can screw together (example: https://www.budk.com/Amazon-Jungle-Survivor-Break-Down-Spear-Cast-2Cr13-51329)
I don't have this one, but I do have one similar to this, and it's remarkably solid-feeling, I'm pretty happy with it aside from the whole "why would you ever need a spear" question. And it seems easy enough to put together with 5-10 minutes warning on a fight, which might match reasonably well to gang violence: you know when the other gang shows up and as long as you know you're going to fight rather than run, you just screw it together and put it down somewhere that's easy to reach for when things kick off. If they don't, take it back apart, stick it in your backpack, and head out.
wraelk
7mo ago
I think the issue there is doing it after the primaries.
"The candidate people voted for wasn't going to win, so we picked a different one for them" is kind of an awkward line to have to focus on.
wraelk
7mo ago
Not really relevant to the broader topic, but there's an incredibly on-point example of this: a reddit account (https://old.reddit.com/user/UR_WRONG_ABOUT_V22) whose sole purpose was correcting people who thought the V-22 Osprey was unsafe.
About 7 months ago, he died in a V-22 crash off the coast of Japan.
(The only thing I changed about the wording of the original riddle is to clarify that you must take two entities across the river every time, not simply that you can, because even though can is how /u/Gillitrut originally phrased it, must is how he seems to be interpreting it with "Note that the very first step violates the rules!" in response to the LLM he asked taking only one entity across in its first step.)
The problem with the solution Gillitrut's AI testing gives isn't how many entities are taken across, it's that the AI immediately leaves the fox alone with the feed. That would be fine under the standard formulation of the problem, but under the wording actually given, it leads to the fox eating the feed.
wraelk
1yr ago
Would this suggest that someone having multiple different fetishes would need all of them present to get off?
wraelk
1yr ago
In that example, in wartime that's not "shooting an unarmed man", that's "enemy soldier engaging in act of war" and legitimate target.
Well that's the thing, that man is both. He is an enemy soldier engaging in an act of war and a legitimate target, but he is also an unarmed man.
So there are two rules in conflict, both completely applicable and giving opposite results. What actually happens has a lot to do with which rule is emphasized and brought to the forefront.
wraelk
1yr ago
For some reason, this 24-hour window from Friday morning to Saturday morning seems to always pack a lot of news
This doesn't work for all of your examples, but I think part of it is that companies will often wait until late Friday to make moves that could get a lot of pushback. The extremely-online types will always pick it up anyway, but the normal people will often be less interested because it's the weekend and they've got things to do, so it reduces how much it gets picked up. By the time Monday rolls around the momentum of the pushback is often lost.
Actually, hadn't thought about it like this before, but that's also probably to reduce big stock shifts, give the news time to settle a bit before people get to trade on it.
I think the "annexing canada" and the "tariff canada unless they accede to his demands" might be coming from the same place: "you're entirely dependent on the US, so get in line and work to our benefit, rather than benefiting from our largesse and then stabbing us in the back in every public forum you get into"
I think there are some other similar things in Trump's policies, like asking NATO to pay for its own defense: some of that is just cost-cutting, but some of it is the NATO countries deriding the US for being a warmonger while being completely dependent on its warfighting capability. I suspect if they were praising their benevolent protector instead of claiming they're superior because they don't need to spend money on weapons, it would be a lower priority.
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