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Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6hr ago
For those watching the Presidential election, things have been looking very bad for Kamala lately, with national polls tightening, and Trump ahead in several key states. Although it remains too close to call, Trump's odds have shot up to 57% according to Polymarket.
And I still don't see how people can take any of that seriously. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to prepare myself for how much worse things are going to get under the inevitable eight years of Harris.
But most importantly, it's explicit racial discrimination against the 86% of the country who isn't black.
What's new about that? If you were the sort to care (negatively) about that, weren't you already highly likely to vote Trump? What's one more such thing on top of the many that already exist. And for liberal whites, you've got their whole pro-outgroup feeling thing.
Personally, I think this appeal is likely to backfire as most swing voters are sick of handouts to people who aren't them.
Aren't most "swing voters," particularly these days, the politically "checked out," who don't pay attention to any of this, and thus are unlikely to hear about this particular proposal?
georgioz
6hr ago
It may be statistically correct, but it doesn't justify restricting my liberty to make my own choices.
Of course it may justify it, there are situations where your choices are limited exactly on these grounds - like with myriads of other illegal drugs and many other illegal activities, that limit your liberty to make many choices. What are you talking about.
pbmonster
6hr ago
I get what you mean, but the Chinese navy is purpose built to blockade the island anyway, and innovation that is making this easier isn't really helping them much. Instead, it moves the power balance towards parity in favor of Taiwan, who now will have a much easier time attacking ships than they had before. At the same time, it is of course also moving the power balance from a US carrier group towards China - for the same reason. And sure, I have no doubts that China's drone capabilities will be (or most likely, already are) top of the line. The thing with drones is just that offense is vastly easier than defense.
I also think that marine drones (as in: relatively large drones that are swimming and/or diving) will have a bigger impact on the Taiwan situation that quadrotors will have.
mdurak
6hr ago
This is why cases like Citizens United were always straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
What do you mean by this? What camels did it swallow?
mdurak
6hr ago
You make it sound as if pollster bias is just a simple matter of them deciding not to correct for them, rather than them trying repeatedly to correct for it but reality being surprising in various ways.
I watched a Sagaar/Crystal Breaking Point show on the topic, and to me it seemed funny that for some reason none of them mentioned the potentially most important reason: crypto has been historically used to protect money from various actors, including garnishing the income due to child support or other such obligations. If you have irregular or under the table income, you can store it even using cash such as with bitcoin ATMs or peer-to-peer trading, there are also other methods. Sending signals that the government will be easy on these practices may be very important for black men specifically.
SerialStateLineXer
6hr ago
Real estate has appreciated over the recent past, but YIMBYs would argue it's just because local governments restrict good land use
I don't think so. Upzoning increases land value, because you can build more valuable structures on land zoned for higher density. The main reason housing has appreciated is a combination of high-skilled workers centralizing in a relative handful of cities, and falling interest rates driving up asset prices. When your asset purchases are highly leveraged (e.g. ten to one on a mortgage with 10% down), this can be extremely lucrative.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
6hr ago
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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6hr ago
The Byrds of Virginia and Robert Byrd of West Virginia are not related. Strange but true.
NunoSempere
6hr ago
Very nice!
whenhaveiever
7hr 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!
7hr 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
7hr 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
8hr 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
8hr 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
9hr 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
9hr 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_
9hr 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
9hr 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
9hr 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_
9hr 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.
I may be one of those people, but I do consider all rights as privileges. Right means entitlement absent of any duty, which means somebody else has duty providing you with said right. Even original US set of rights in American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man gives government duties through law to to enforce these
rightsprivileges.In this case right for asylum means nothing else other than duty of you fellow citizens to accommodate foreigners. If society as a whole refuses these duties, then said "right" is dead. Duties related to rights are not enforced by god who strikes you with lightning and they are not enshrined in trajectories of planets in Solar system. They are social conventions and they are direct results of what duties citizens are willing and capable to undertake - we have all seen what happened to human rights during COVID for example.
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