Yokem

And the beautiful thing about democracies is that, as long as voting rights exist, nothing is inevitable.

It is a good demonstration that democracy does not guarantee good governance. But it can be very good at removing very bad governance.

I was a senior in high school at a Denver area HS when Columbine happened. And then it kept happening. Just 4 years ago here in Bend at Safeway. These events aren't some unquestionable force of nature. We do not need to live this way.

The only thing more heartbreaking than these things is that we don't do anything to prevent the next one

Gutting. I go by this school several times a week. I can't imagine what the parents of the kids going there are going through right now.

I hope Musk in particular recognizes that if he chooses to make the Ukrainians his enemy, they will fight him. And that he has a huge amount of very soft infrastructure targets that the SBU could potentially reach.

Ford Crown Victoria

This is pretty in line with what would be expected from a Maslow's hierarchy of needs approach to politics. When there isn't a clear threat to safety, cultural differences have way more salience. When there is a serious threat, those issues/differences subside.

Markdown: the one programming language to rule them all.

In the US that is. The Chinese seem to be doing pretty well at just making the things more effective, useful and efficient without going insane.

It was basically the same thing in 2020. Had he been a little bit more empathetic and magnanimous in the opening months of covid, he would have won reelection in a walk. But he didn't. And he couldn't have. Because he wouldn't be who he is if he had.

This is why virtue matters. Good stuff whose benefits accrue to evil people is bad.

As someone who studied history and now works in a technical field: History is best understood as a practice of taking the time to understand how things got to be the way they are now. Which is critically important if you want to make the present better. Which, is a very big part of engineering.

We now have Schrödinger's export ban.

The WHCA probably needs to go anyways in the next Dem admin. The current setup breeds far too much insularity and access driven journalism. Replace it with a process to credential a couple hundred folks from the top-n publications, and then run a weekly lottery.

I think it is okay to require shareholders to have longer time horizons then quarter to quarter and/or require liquidity lockups to participate in corporate governance, but the impunity caused by permanent dual class shares goes too far.

It has finally occurred to me that he thinks trade deficits are what causes budget deficits and I can't even...

This also means that if Thune was serious about making a diesel export ban happen before the election, that idea is dead in the water now.

Could this be the bit that gets Kash fired? It's ridiculous and embarrassing enough that it might just make Trump pull the trigger...

To be clear, I am not an “AI is a scam” guy. I find this tech fascinating and powerful and potentially very dangerous, albeit not world-ending. But scientists are also driving the net cost of electricity toward zero and designing boutique mRNA vaccines. That’s at least an equally huge deal!

A very wide and broad bubble was inflated on top of deep precarity. So, when it popped, the effects were much more devastating throughout the economy. The chaos Trump, the GOP, and their sponsors are causing now, is an effort to recreate that precarity.

The nightclub scene in John Wick - the initial half of gentle singing of Think by Kalaida contrasts with the brutal violence perfectly. Then the techno beats adds rhythm to the rest of the sequence... m.youtube.com/watch?v=t4vr...

The problem is that I'm not sure they can actually ban them. They probably can regulate anyone offering them via an API, but as long as the logic of Bernstein vs US is upheld and applied to models and their weights, the distribution of the models will be difficult to ban.

This is quite simply a consequence of inflation effecting almost everyone while unemployment only effecting those who don't have jobs.

I’m for higher taxes on the middle class and no free parking, I know I’m a freak

This is why I care about AI coding.

This is true to a point. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is real and further material improvements at the lower levels has diminishing returns and opposition does better appealing to higher levels.

the neoliberals became centrists who want to restrict immigration and trans rights the left became neoliberals who want to cut taxes and open borders the centrists became [checks notes] left wing partisans who want to water the tree of liberty with the blood of the tyrant? am i reading that right?

the real answer is all politics is retail politics and nobody is actually coherent and everyone on the left changed their tune on immigration as soon as trump got elected

There are ~3 layers to this I think - 1) where your parents grew up, 2) where you grew up, and 3) where you've spent a good chunk of your adult life.

Without saying your age, what is your favorite movie that came out when you were 20?

I think the better hypothetical is could the president demolish the Supreme Court building?

How much of the seeming irrationality of the crude markets has been a result of the broader market being refinery bound and not crude supply bound?

My extremely boring hypothesis is that it's due to the University of Michigan switching its sampling methodology from CATI to online panels in 2024. Maybe it's social desirability bias, maybe it's the nature of who signs up for panels vs picking the phone and agreeing to answer questions.

Legitimacy of this kind of thing also matters. And you get that when you win an election making it clear that a) the court is corrupt, and b) expansion/reform (of some kind) is going to be done to fix it.

The next Dem president needs to rename Lake Worth Lagoon in Florida to something befitting the resident on its shores.