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MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4hr ago
The Byrds of Virginia and Robert Byrd of West Virginia are not related. Strange but true.
NunoSempere
4hr ago
Very nice!
whenhaveiever
4hr ago
I've idly wondered before how hard something like Meshtastic would be, so this has definitely got me interested.
How did you choose the Heltec v3 over the many other options?
Are "guerilla installations" common in the Meshtastic community?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
Usually kill-on-sight zones are in military bases behind fences and extensive signage. They're not on the edge of refugee camps, places you'd expect civilians to be walking around.
phailyoor
5hr ago
"This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over."
It's certainly excessive but I'd expect that shoot on sight zones aren't that out of the ordinary especially during wartime. And instead of making grunts decide what's a threat or not, have them shoot anything that moves.
America currently has the luxury of letting pro-palestine protestors occupy a warship without hurting them, but I'm sure there are still some spicy places where you can get vaporized just for showing up.
phailyoor
6hr ago
Trump's big tent rhetoric definitely makes the rising tide that happens to do all this interpretation somewhat reasonable. But Kambala's talking about straight up giving helicopter money and other benefits to black men at the explicit exclusion of others.
The prediction markets, if anything, seem to be underselling Trump's chances right now.
As much as I think the "Trump campaign is in disarray! They were not prepared for Kamala! Coconut-couchfucker-joy!" offensive was fake, I'll keep repeating "it's not over until it's over". Someone else also pointed out back then that relying on pollsters' past bias might be risky, because you never know when they might decide to correct for it.
2rafa
6hr ago
Other countries have let people bet on politics for a long time and no, they’re far from always accurate. Right before Brexit, the betting market hugely favored remaining in the EU for example.
2rafa
6hr ago
I have had this thought too. If weed was fully legal but THC was capped at where it was in the black market in the late 90s rather than the ultra-potent strains we have now, most people would just buy what was legal rather than relying on the black market.
jeroboam
7hr ago
The prediction markets, if anything, seem to be underselling Trump's chances right now.
I'd check out RealClearPolitics, which does a good job of aggregating all the polls. Trump is ahead in 6 of 7 swing states right now. Based on current polling averages, Trump wins 302 electoral votes. More importantly, polls are moving in his favor each day:
https://www.realclearpolling.com/elections/president/2024/battleground-states
Another data point. At this point in the campaign 8 years ago, Hilary was up by over 6.7 points nationally. Biden was up by 10 points. So we'd expect the polls to undersell Republican support on average. If the 2024 campaign follows the same trajectory as previous ones, Trump wins the popular vote by 3% and an electoral college landslide.
So, absent other information, I'd put Trump's odds at 70-80%. But I also know that I'm lacking information and fallible. I trust that the prediction markets are likely to be a truer reflection of the current state of the race than my opinions. There's actually a decent amount of liquidity in this particular market, with over $1 billion gambled, and a small bid ask spread of just 0.1%.
Back in the day, I'm sure we assumed that AI agents would gather funds by good old fashioned hacking, mercantile exchange of goods and services, blackmail and bargaining.
That was very 2006. Today's AI agents get money by receiving crypto airdrops of GOATSE memecoins that they shill on twitter:
Full story: https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1846220545542529329 (normally not the most reliable source, but repligate assures us he's basically accurate on the facts and repligate is an expert on schizo AI backrooms stuff)
It (Terminal of Truths) didn't even do any of the coding, just marketing. This shitcoin has an ostensible market cap around $260 million USD right now, though the vast majority is locked up as usual in Solana/memecoins and so the 'real liquidity marketcap' is about $3 M.
https://pump.fun/CzLSujWBLFsSjncfkh59rUFqvafWcY5tzedWJSuypump
Truth Terminal has ~$300,000 of GOAT in its wallet and is on its way to being the first AI agent millionaire
Anyway I am disappointed that my net worth is lower than an AI made 5 months ago. In principle, any of us could've done this. All it did was shitpost on twitter hard enough! It didn't even need to have a pretty face like hawk tuah girl. There's a general consensus that these bots are literally subhuman, I think we underestimate their present capabilities. Charisma alone gets you a long way, even if it's schizo shoggoth charisma.
anon_
7hr ago
North Carolina gerrymandering. Pretty explicit. Appealing to the VRA was a fig leaf; the easiest way to satisfy it would have been to draw reasonable districts.
That's actually an interesting question. It's not clear to me from first principles (I understand Gingles makes it clear what SCOTUS thinks the VRA requires) whether packing minority voters into majority-minority districts or diluting them across other districts are both/either/neither to be found discriminatory.
I think you're right that some combination of pack/crack can be overtly discriminatory, but it just seems weird to me that the opposite actions are discriminatory. There's no clear 'arrow' nor is it manifest whether it's the voters in the packed or cracked districts are discriminated-against -- and surely it can't be both concurrently.
[ And as a normative factor that I think is irrelevant to the discussion, I think majority-minority districts are probably bad on net because to win them, politicians needs to take extreme positions which are (a) bad in themselves and (b) prevent those politicians from appealing to wider (e.g. statewide) office and are a kind of weird glass-ceiling kind of thing. ]
HalloweenSnarry
7hr ago
Maybe the loans could be structured such that, while there's no serious obligation to pay it back, if you do, then...something happens. Not sure what, but that could make such a loan more than just helicopter money.
HalloweenSnarry
7hr ago
Perhaps legalizing marijuana would have an impact on modern reefer madness rates if there was more of a free market to allow for non-insanity-inducing weed?
To point towards the gun analogy, the market has space for everything from wood-stocked single-shot shotguns and .22-caliber plinkers, all the way to semi-auto .50-caliber rifles and ATF-baiting niche products. Who's to say that the weed market cannot also sustain a range of products with different enough CBD levels to make things safer?
Now, granted, you might still be right that a thorough decriminalization might be enough to achieve this, but we must consider the possibility that the market may have an unaddressed demand for healthier product.
anon_
7hr ago
and it's not clear to me that voluntary adult incest leading to pregnancy leading to abortion is a common enough situation to even need an exception drawn for it, or harmful enough to require one.
It's not common, but it's also not terribly smart for a civilization to knowingly and intentionally bring into the world babies with such severe deficiencies. I understand horrible things happen by accident all the time and we should have grace and charity to those cases, but incest is taboo for a good reason ...
It is brazen racism though. The "others" doesn't change it. Maybe it will include other so called people of color, but that doesn't change the facts.
GaBeRockKing
7hr ago
Thank you for these informative and interesting links. I'd wager that the starlink decision specifically has more to do with elon musk's behavior re: threatening to cut service to ukraine (and other related ukranian-russian war shenanigans) but will otherwise concede the point.
Goodguy
8hr ago
I know very little about prediction markets, so can someone explain to me how likely it is that Trump's surge on for example Polymarket is the result more of speculative behavior than of people rationally trying to predict the winner of the election? I don't really see any reason to currently view the race as being anything other than pretty close to 50-50. People might say well, if I believe that then why not try to make some money on it? And maybe that's fair. But that does not necessarily mean that the betting odds on Polymarket are actually an accurate guide to the likely election outcome.
HalloweenSnarry
8hr ago
But what does that mean for the above question, exactly?
Living in a shithole has its advantages. Mainly that competition is a joke.
In America, a Stanford Economics PhD working at the fed is at best a lackey at a Trading Desk. In countries like Colombia, if you have any PhD and work at the central bank, you have real shot at running the printing press.
Now tell me who is more badass. Or influential.
Another example, here in Chile I know a radiologist who moved to the states. Earned real bank there. Strangely returned within a year. His reason?
"I feel richer here"
Incognito
8hr ago
It was doomed from the start. The "No" ads practically wrote themselves. The Yes campaign had no path to victory. In the Republic referendum, the No campaign argued technicalities "Even if you like the idea of a republic, this specific proposal is bad" - and that would have worked here too. So they gave almost no details and tried to coast through on vibes, then rightly got criticised for asking the public to sign a blank cheque.
As someone who cares about indigenous rights, I was angry at Albanese for introducing the legislation and it all played out pretty much as I anticipated. I did vote yes for idiosyncratic "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" reasons. The whole debacle set back indigenous relations at least a decade I reckon. Anecdotally, I've seen a marked decrease in "acknowledgement of country" lip service before events/meetings etc in the last year. And now everyone turns a blind eye to the goon squad that rounds up blackfellas in the CBD and dumps them in a park somewhere.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8hr ago
My mistake. I conflated him with Harry Byrd Sr., who never made such a pivot, but also died much earlier.
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
8hr ago
I don't think the skeptics (hi) doubt that Israelis sometimes do awful things, including shooting children. Or that we believe Israel is noble and innocent.
I do tend to believe that their enemies are among the worst in a generally shitty part of the world. And that people who bring up cherry-picked and carefully described incidents taking anything critical of Israel at face value, and then extrapolate to generalizations about how this is just typical Jewish behavior, do not, in fact, actually care in the slightest about alleged dead Palestinian children, but are happy to invoke dead children if it presents another opportunity to talk about how Jews are lizard-people.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Israel, but it's hard to take them seriously from someone known to hate Jews. I mean, if suddenly you're willing to call interviews by the NYT asking people in Gaza if the Israelis are committing war crimes "high quality evidence" you can surely see why this prompts some see skepticism.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9hr ago
Uh, uranium's an actinide (and thus lithophile), the thing I just said is highly concentrated in Earth's crust (see e.g. here for Sol System vs. here for Earth's crust; note that this somewhat understates the effect because both are normed to silicon being 10^6 and silicon is mildly concentrated in the crust compared to undifferentiated rocky bodies/epically concentrated in Earth as a whole compared to icy bodies). Sorry if that wasn't clear.
The yellow region in the second graph is the highly-siderophilic elements (plus tellurium), which are strongly depleted in the crust, and indeed osmium's one of them.
And then stopped right there and treated them like the wider cohort instead of tailoring the message to who they are targeting.
This is fucking amateur hour.
Like how does one suck at marketing so bad that they try nanny state patronizing on the libertarian leaning business owners? It genuinely feels like being talked down to because you're black.
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