dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
22hr ago
Something like
Authority: Clinton, you must turn your private email server contents over immediately
Clinton: I will have my lawyer do this
Lawyer: here ya go! sorry it took a bit
Authority: it looks like tons of emails are missing
Lawyer: oh, yes. Clinton has a bunch of personal email intermixed with official email, so I looked through it and only turned over her official stuff
Authority: no, give us everything
Lawyer: lol can't do that. I deleted everything that wasn't official business based on my criteria for what was official and what wasn't
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
Smoking sucks. The first drag is like ten seconds of enjoyment followed by what feels like several minutes of work and wishing it would be over already. I can't imagine getting addicted to it, but also I can't imagine anything more upsetting to be casually addicted to.
Vaping is a little nicer and I would definitely never buy my own nicotine vape pen because I could imagine using it whenever I feel even slightly tired and pulling on it all day long.
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
I suggest getting a vape pen with weed oil cartridge and just pulling a small amount and seeing how you feel. Much much easier to control than a gummie. You have to get reasonably high to have trouble waking up the next morning.
I wouldn't do it every night for the rest of your life, but rather with an eye on seeing the sharp contrast between not calm and calm and learning what helps you move that way.
What gets me is that none of this even matters anymore, so I don't get the big deal made over it.
Because in the popular culture narrative the Republicans and Trump specifically went full retard over Hillary's private email server, and it was all a nothingburger. So now the shoe is on the other foot and liberals are having an orgasm.
Yes in actuality, Hillary's thing was not a complete nothingburger. The events are not really comparable and Hillary did some actual corrupt things around turning her emails over but that's why this is a big deal if you're trying to score points against red tribe.
dr_analog
razorboy
4d ago
Right. From a box checking perspective I'm sure it has all of the security features they want. From a practical perspective I'm sure every foreign intelligence agency knows multiple backdoors for it.
When it comes to fuckups - i would say this is run of the mill one. As a person that has dealt with security and opsec - at some point you just accept that C level people will do stupid stuff and move on. That secrets will be sent in plaintext. That passwords will be written on post it stamps or spell to the secretary in the cafeteria where everyone can overhear.
I work in cybersecurity and this is my reaction as well. Overall, I'm honestly very impressed that they used Signal. Nature is healing!
It was dumb of them to add a journalist to "Houthi PC small group" chat but shit happens.
Yes yes ideally they would not be discussing this on their extremely difficult to secure smartphones and instead followed official guidance to use MS Teams with whatever dumb compliance features Microsoft added but we all know C level execs aren't going to listen. I don't even blame them.
Imagine how awful the federal government's approved classified information messaging things are.
This is the same reason I didn't hold it against HRC for having her own email server. Imagine how shitty the State Dept's approved mail service would have been in 2009.
(Though that's obviously a lot less secure than Signal)
dr_analog
razorboy
5d ago
Humiliating leftists for anti-Jewish bigotry stings and leaves them dumbfounded. Whereas doing this for anti-white bigotry gets them all riled up to rally against "white supremacy".
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
Is your argument that dispensing with due process is fine because Trump has only rendered bad people to an El Salvadoran prison AFAWK?
The Venezuelan gang members deported to a for hire prison in El Salvador with no judicial review (or in defiance of judicial review) is honestly a lot more frightening than this story. This Becky story just sounds like something that can happen in any country. When visiting our offices in Asia, HR would counsel me very carefully to say I'm not "working", I'm "meeting". I doubt if I slipped up at those borders I'd have a very pleasant return flight experience. Especially if I was already inside for months and got refused a weekend getaway to a neighboring country.
The El Salvador prison thing though. You could imagine the Trump administration just disappearing people they find annoying. The only cover they have right now is that most of them probably were gang members.
Musk and JP could have avoided so much self-inflicted misery if the bottom 99% of their tweets were deleted instead of posted, with hardly any loss in upside.
Being cut out for it means being cool in the face of ugly attacks. It means "acting Presidential". Refusing to be trolled. Refusing to engage in trolling. Have principles, but if you don't, at least pretend to instead of pitching them to own the libs.
A publicist could have saved them each boatloads of treasure, their reputation and their sanity.
dr_analog
razorboy
14d ago
You're onto something there for sure. If you ever draw the ire of a Twitter hate mob, the first hundred people that are angry at you make you feel bad. But by the time you've seen the thousandth you have fully dehumanized them and wonder how you can use this power.
Have we considered how destructive having the political left be angry at you is to the sanity of people who aren't cut out for it? That is, people who aren't politicians?
As a prior example, I'm thinking of Jordan Peterson, who seems to have followed a similar trajectory of brilliant man becoming increasingly unhinged as political attacks step up.
Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.
His fallout with Sam Harris over losing a bet re: the number of total COVID cases there would be in the US seem like early hallmarks of Musk's decline.
Since then it seems like the left's hatred of him has only intensified, not that he didn't help himself by indulging in trolling them back. Basically, having an irresistible urge to troll and being a target of the left can drive some men to ruin.
Anyone want to talk about GLP-1s again?
I started taking them mid-December. I've lost about 11 pounds so far. I haven't increased to the full dose yet because it's having a moderate effect at this ramping dose. I started at 220 lbs and am hoping to get down to 185 lbs
When tested, at around 220 lbs, my VO2Max was about 50. I can run about a 25 minute 5k.
Playing with the calculators a bit, if I can drop to 185 and simply maintain my cardio capacity, I should end up with a VO2Max of 60. This would mean a sub-20 minute 5k should be achievable.
I'd be over the moon if I could pull that off.
To change gears a bit, I'm kind of embarrassed that I didn't understand until recently how much being overweight affected my running performance. It's so obvious in hindsight, if someone hands you a 35 pound dumbbell and says go try to run a 5k with it, it's obviously going to drag you down. No doctor, sports PT or coach has ever quite told me that though, probably because it's considered rude and most people can't reliably and significantly affect their weight.
dr_analog
razorboy
20d ago
For example, when debating Russia, arguments often amount to Russia is evil because they aren't onboard with pride.
It is one fairly reliable way to judge how ideologically distant a society is from the Western enlightenment tradition. Liberals may not put it in those terms but that's what they actually want.
It seems like existence of pride parades seems to be a key benchmark for judging the moral virtue of a country. Why is this benchmark so central?
It has its limits. Israel has pride parades while Gaza does not and we know what liberals think about this conflict. "Victim of colonialism" is an even more important moral virtue, apparently.
dr_analog
razorboy
21d ago
I've been to places like this though don't have anything but anecdotes. My guess is "the pace of life is slower" means markets here are broken, so you can't buy much, so there's really no point in working much. They didn't choose the simple life out enlightened non-materialism but because there's no way to choose anything else.
What I'm saying is as constructed, they are literally incapable of changing enough to do what they need to win.
The Man Enough ad (YouTube link) really drove home how unbelievably out of touch the Kamala campaign was with working class men. Somehow managed to directly insult and talk down to the demographic they were doing the worst with and actively trying to target.
They polled terribly with white men. They really needed not to do this! They couldn't help it.
I was a full on "lesser evil for Kamala" voter but this, this ad nearly made me just leave the ballot blank.
dr_analog
razorboy
24d ago
How much aid would you provide? Weapons? Money? No-Fly Zone? Air support? Troops on the ground? Nuclear umbrella? Something else?
I would continue to provide intelligence sharing, weapons, economic aid. I would not involve our own military. Continue to strike as many deals as possible to economically isolate Russia as well.
What is the end-state your policy is aiming for? A ceasefire? Deter subsequent Russian invasion? Restoration of Ukraine's original borders? The Russian army destroyed? Putin deposed? Russia broken up? Something else?
Slowly and annoyingly bleed out Russian resources until they get exhausted and go home. No grand last stand. No obvious red lines crossed. Just endless quagmire for Russia, enormous cost for no lasting progress. Make it crystal clear that there's a rules based order and if you just cross boundaries in a war of conquest we will not make it easy.
A world where we didn't defend Ukraine is a lot more volatile. I contend that our willingness to simply surrender Afghanistan to the Taliban because we got bored is likely what contributed to the Ukraine invasion. I'm sure Putin thought he's nowhere near as fucked up as the Taliban, surely the US won't mind if he retakes Ukraine.
Oops.
Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on the Ukraine war are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
If this causes WW3 and we all die in nuclear armageddon I would say it was a bad idea. But to some degree it would be unavoidable if Russia is that suicidal and that expansionist.
dr_analog
razorboy
24d ago
This kind of asylum is very much in the spirit of the asylum treaty that Congress enacted and the President should be blocked from deporting them.
dr_analog
razorboy
25d ago
elicit glee from yours truly because they're so obviously needed.
I have expressed similar amounts of glee. Here on TheMotte even. Repeatedly. Watching people on /r/fednews react with outrage at the collision with reality has been like porn.
But I still think the government does some useful, good things and the carpet bombing approach DOGE is taking is very costly. I would consider it worthwhile if the goal was to substantially reduce the deficit, but not if the goal is to score ideological victory. If the goal is to keep the deficits and cut taxes, you can score ideological victory through more surgical cutting.
dr_analog
razorboy
25d ago
This inner peace comes from recognizing that nobody cares and that it's never going to happen.
I had been resigned to this. Then Elon and Trump appeared initially quite serious about fixing the deficit. If there was a silver lining to these greedy unprincipled clowns taking control of the government, to the fucking all-in podcast / PayPal mafia now being in the President's ear, it would be that they were at least serious about the budget. Libertarians rejoice!
Except they aren't. Or, at least, Trump used Elon. Or, Elon was never serious about it either.
Instead we're slash and burning the government, which includes useful important stuff with no replacement. And we're doing it for, what... approximately nothing? Because the cruelty is the point? To own the libs?
dr_analog
razorboy
25d ago
Wait what. If you don't think due process was already dispensed with in the first batch of people who were deported directly to a foreign prison without judicial review I'm not sure what continuing to exchange information here will accomplish.
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