"here's a 20% credit towards your next cruise!"
Bahahahaha yeah sounds like they'll jump right on that.
Bahahahaha yeah sounds like they'll jump right on that.
Isn't that really what freedom of religion boils down to, from an age where we distributed morality more?
Something doesn't smell right. Why are any voting machines up today? It isn't like there's an election just today?
Yeah, your problem is not enough caffeine.
(And as a nod to continuity, I stopped with coffee myself because it was harsh on my stomach and I've got a pretty iron stomach!)
(And as a nod to continuity, I stopped with coffee myself because it was harsh on my stomach and I've got a pretty iron stomach!)
"kiddo, those are planes and cars. We used to mass produce them so virtually anyone could drive or go on a passenger flight."
#Crowdstrike #outage #Microsoft
The Crowdstrike homepage is unintentionally hilarious today
Even the very worst Economies can turn around on a dime if you clear out all the parasitic shit.
Part of the problem is that they're just tourists so they think the Republicans win every court case they get to scotus, which isn't true -- if SCOTUS was just an organ of the Republican party, Trump would be just about to finish his second term in office.
Most people criticizing don't realize for example that the court has had an overwhelming number of cases that ended up being 7-0 recently, and there's cases where some liberal justices and some conservative justices combined to get a slim outcome. They're not politicians, they're judges and have a different view of the world. Under Trump most Republicans hated Roberts for example.
Many such people think they would have opposed the Nazis if they were Germans in 1936, while loving who the establishment tells them to love and hating who the establishment tells them to hate and not realizing their behavior would have aligned them directly with the Nazis in Germany in 1936.
Most people criticizing don't realize for example that the court has had an overwhelming number of cases that ended up being 7-0 recently, and there's cases where some liberal justices and some conservative justices combined to get a slim outcome. They're not politicians, they're judges and have a different view of the world. Under Trump most Republicans hated Roberts for example.
Many such people think they would have opposed the Nazis if they were Germans in 1936, while loving who the establishment tells them to love and hating who the establishment tells them to hate and not realizing their behavior would have aligned them directly with the Nazis in Germany in 1936.
"Oh, the government tells me my food prices are going down. I'm going to head to the bank and tell them to put the money back in my account"
[admin mode] not sure exactly what happened, looks like the web server became inactive after an automated update. It came back immediately when I told it to.
I've seen a lot of people on the left making the claim that the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was a setup, a false flag operation intended to help him win the next presidential election.
There's a few things that really make the conspiracy theory a less beautiful hypothesis than it could be.
1. The Democrats *have* been calling Trump Hitler and saying he supports neo nazis and white supremacists for going on 10 years now, which supports the idea that some whackjob could get it in his head that he'd be lauded as a hero for killing Trump rather than getting a bullet to the face rather than this being some big conspiracy
2. The Democrats *have* been saying Trump winning will mean the end of democracy, again supporting the idea that some whackjob believed them
3. The Democrats *have* supported political violence explicitly for years, in particular the summer of love riots where the current sitting vice president went on national television and said "they're not gonna stop [...] and they should not stop", and fundraised to pay the bail of violent rioters to get them back on the street, and Democratic DAs refused to prosecute ultimately anyway. This supports the idea that whackjobs would believe they'd be supported for specific political violence, lowering the psychological bar for engaging in such acts independently of the need for a conspiracy
4. The secret service works for Joe Biden's federal government, making the idea of Joe Biden's government secretly plotting to get Trump elected by faking an assassination attempt look like left wing QAnon where Trump is secretly still the President or something -- it doesn't make any sense that the other party's government would do that
5. Even if the secret service worked for Trump's federal government, it is highly documented that many people in the federal government were actively working against Trump because they hate him, so the idea that a government filled with people who hate him would help get him elected and absolutely nobody would rat them out seems far-fetched. They're not going to just stand by while an actual conspiracy to fake an assassination that also resulted in the death of an innocent person and the critical injury of two others occurs.
There's a few things that really make the conspiracy theory a less beautiful hypothesis than it could be.
1. The Democrats *have* been calling Trump Hitler and saying he supports neo nazis and white supremacists for going on 10 years now, which supports the idea that some whackjob could get it in his head that he'd be lauded as a hero for killing Trump rather than getting a bullet to the face rather than this being some big conspiracy
2. The Democrats *have* been saying Trump winning will mean the end of democracy, again supporting the idea that some whackjob believed them
3. The Democrats *have* supported political violence explicitly for years, in particular the summer of love riots where the current sitting vice president went on national television and said "they're not gonna stop [...] and they should not stop", and fundraised to pay the bail of violent rioters to get them back on the street, and Democratic DAs refused to prosecute ultimately anyway. This supports the idea that whackjobs would believe they'd be supported for specific political violence, lowering the psychological bar for engaging in such acts independently of the need for a conspiracy
4. The secret service works for Joe Biden's federal government, making the idea of Joe Biden's government secretly plotting to get Trump elected by faking an assassination attempt look like left wing QAnon where Trump is secretly still the President or something -- it doesn't make any sense that the other party's government would do that
5. Even if the secret service worked for Trump's federal government, it is highly documented that many people in the federal government were actively working against Trump because they hate him, so the idea that a government filled with people who hate him would help get him elected and absolutely nobody would rat them out seems far-fetched. They're not going to just stand by while an actual conspiracy to fake an assassination that also resulted in the death of an innocent person and the critical injury of two others occurs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUF7AvnT8UQ
Really interesting video making the case that the 1960s is the opposite of the 2020s. It looks at 6 different factors which make it different, and some of them are pretty compelling.
Really interesting video making the case that the 1960s is the opposite of the 2020s. It looks at 6 different factors which make it different, and some of them are pretty compelling.
I've contemplated the strengths of democracy (including republics where representatives are voted in, so consider parliamentary democracies or democratic republics in my use of the term and not just direct democracy), and it seems pretty clear to me today.
Democracy has 2 major benefits over other forms of government:
First and foremost, when leaders get particularly bad, the process inherently allows leaders to be replaced without spending overwhelming resources on civil war or just being stuck with them until they die. When societies are in good shape, this can be an overwhelming advantage because civil war is a massive waste of resources -- men who die in war are dead for good, productive capacity used to produce gunpowder is effectively wasted, and in modern conflicts stuff like battleships have a huge amount of resources put into their creation that can end up on the ocean floor completely wasted. Therefore, the overhead of maintaining government is reduced.
Second, because individuals get a say under democracy, there is much higher buy-in over other forms of government. I recall recently hearing the argument made that taxes can be much higher under a democracy for example because people feel they're paying for something they have a stake in. This can also lead to overwhelming social cohesiveness since while people might not agree with every specific policy, they participated in a small way in the government that rules them.
So there's obviously 4 major downsides as well:
The lack of any sort of real leadership required to win an election compared to the leadership required to win a civil war means that people in charge of democracies don't necessarily need to be good leaders. Steel sharpens steel, but many successful representatives are instead of good leaders good at fundraising and good at toeing the party line.
The lack of a sort of revolutionary civil wars mean that leaders of democracies are often trying to make smaller reforms to systems with overwhelming ontological inertia. Simply winning an election won't be enough for either party to get rid of the administrative state or entitlements that are going to absolutely crush the next several generations who are going to be working to pay for money being handed to their grandparents.
The above downside as well as the second benefit combine to mean that democracies often grow out of control. People accept much higher taxes, and they accept much more government interference in their lives, because they feel like the growing mass of elites sucking like a lamprey off the side of the common man are at least "our" lamprey. Witness the overwhelming increases in government debt in many democracies over the past 20 years. Canada has nearly tripled its federal debt under Trudeau, and the US has increased its federal debt nearly 10 times since 2001. Moreover, government as % of GDP is gargantuan, making up at times in recent history over 50%, meaning there's more government than productive economy.
The final downside is related to the first, that steel sharpens steel, and while the people who choose the government in civil wars must be competent at making war, the people who choose the government under universal suffrage don't even need to be able to be basically competent as human beings. In the US, one major fight is over voter ID -- the idea being that a large chunk of voters are so incompetent that they can't possibly get ID, and it's important that such incompetent people have a voice.
Arguably, some of the above downsides are part of the reason why many implementations of democracy required a level of merit in order to earn the right to vote. Of course the past being the past sometimes that "merit" included things that arguably didn't really represent merit like being the right sex or race, but other things such as being a land owner do require someone to at least be able to obtain a parcel of property prior to trying to tell others how to run the government.
I've been throwing an idea around in my head lately of a merit-based system where net tax producers have the vote, and net tax consumers do not. This would mean of course that if you're living off of welfare you have no vote, but it would also mean that many people working for massive industries such as defense would have no vote by default because most of their pay would actually be coming from taxpayers. For someone working somewhere like Boeing, perhaps you could earn the vote by paying very high taxes, effectively paying back the part of your income that comes from taxpayers and only keeping the part of your earnings actually earned in the free market. Under such a system, there would not be a huge incentive to "buy votes", since once one used government to do so those people would no loner have votes. Many CEOs and the like would also lose their right to vote, since their companies rely so heavily on government to be profitable.
If segments of the population aren't contributing, why *should* they get a say? This is the core of both Aristotle and Plato's criticisms of democracy, that the masses want to be given something and they greedily eye the wealthy to give it.
Some might cry about unfairness, but I don't know that this form of "fairness" is necessarily a virtue. If you have 1000 welfare bums and 1 guy who works for a living, according to one vote per person it's fair to have 99.9% of the vote say they should suck the working guy dry, but is it really fair to the only guy doing any work in my hypothetical?
That's also why originally the senate in the US wasn't democratically elected -- they already had a democratically elected house of representatives, they wanted the senate to be a sober second look that was appointed by the states rather than just a second elected house. In Canada, the senate is appointed by the prime minister (which obviously has issues of its own). That's also part of the point of the electoral college in selecting the President under the US system, making sure that the leader isn't just the person who promises the most to the biggest population centers. When a winning presidential candidate isn't the one who won the popular vote, that's the system working as intended to protect against the tyranny of the majority.
Democracy has 2 major benefits over other forms of government:
First and foremost, when leaders get particularly bad, the process inherently allows leaders to be replaced without spending overwhelming resources on civil war or just being stuck with them until they die. When societies are in good shape, this can be an overwhelming advantage because civil war is a massive waste of resources -- men who die in war are dead for good, productive capacity used to produce gunpowder is effectively wasted, and in modern conflicts stuff like battleships have a huge amount of resources put into their creation that can end up on the ocean floor completely wasted. Therefore, the overhead of maintaining government is reduced.
Second, because individuals get a say under democracy, there is much higher buy-in over other forms of government. I recall recently hearing the argument made that taxes can be much higher under a democracy for example because people feel they're paying for something they have a stake in. This can also lead to overwhelming social cohesiveness since while people might not agree with every specific policy, they participated in a small way in the government that rules them.
So there's obviously 4 major downsides as well:
The lack of any sort of real leadership required to win an election compared to the leadership required to win a civil war means that people in charge of democracies don't necessarily need to be good leaders. Steel sharpens steel, but many successful representatives are instead of good leaders good at fundraising and good at toeing the party line.
The lack of a sort of revolutionary civil wars mean that leaders of democracies are often trying to make smaller reforms to systems with overwhelming ontological inertia. Simply winning an election won't be enough for either party to get rid of the administrative state or entitlements that are going to absolutely crush the next several generations who are going to be working to pay for money being handed to their grandparents.
The above downside as well as the second benefit combine to mean that democracies often grow out of control. People accept much higher taxes, and they accept much more government interference in their lives, because they feel like the growing mass of elites sucking like a lamprey off the side of the common man are at least "our" lamprey. Witness the overwhelming increases in government debt in many democracies over the past 20 years. Canada has nearly tripled its federal debt under Trudeau, and the US has increased its federal debt nearly 10 times since 2001. Moreover, government as % of GDP is gargantuan, making up at times in recent history over 50%, meaning there's more government than productive economy.
The final downside is related to the first, that steel sharpens steel, and while the people who choose the government in civil wars must be competent at making war, the people who choose the government under universal suffrage don't even need to be able to be basically competent as human beings. In the US, one major fight is over voter ID -- the idea being that a large chunk of voters are so incompetent that they can't possibly get ID, and it's important that such incompetent people have a voice.
Arguably, some of the above downsides are part of the reason why many implementations of democracy required a level of merit in order to earn the right to vote. Of course the past being the past sometimes that "merit" included things that arguably didn't really represent merit like being the right sex or race, but other things such as being a land owner do require someone to at least be able to obtain a parcel of property prior to trying to tell others how to run the government.
I've been throwing an idea around in my head lately of a merit-based system where net tax producers have the vote, and net tax consumers do not. This would mean of course that if you're living off of welfare you have no vote, but it would also mean that many people working for massive industries such as defense would have no vote by default because most of their pay would actually be coming from taxpayers. For someone working somewhere like Boeing, perhaps you could earn the vote by paying very high taxes, effectively paying back the part of your income that comes from taxpayers and only keeping the part of your earnings actually earned in the free market. Under such a system, there would not be a huge incentive to "buy votes", since once one used government to do so those people would no loner have votes. Many CEOs and the like would also lose their right to vote, since their companies rely so heavily on government to be profitable.
If segments of the population aren't contributing, why *should* they get a say? This is the core of both Aristotle and Plato's criticisms of democracy, that the masses want to be given something and they greedily eye the wealthy to give it.
Some might cry about unfairness, but I don't know that this form of "fairness" is necessarily a virtue. If you have 1000 welfare bums and 1 guy who works for a living, according to one vote per person it's fair to have 99.9% of the vote say they should suck the working guy dry, but is it really fair to the only guy doing any work in my hypothetical?
That's also why originally the senate in the US wasn't democratically elected -- they already had a democratically elected house of representatives, they wanted the senate to be a sober second look that was appointed by the states rather than just a second elected house. In Canada, the senate is appointed by the prime minister (which obviously has issues of its own). That's also part of the point of the electoral college in selecting the President under the US system, making sure that the leader isn't just the person who promises the most to the biggest population centers. When a winning presidential candidate isn't the one who won the popular vote, that's the system working as intended to protect against the tyranny of the majority.
nani the fuck? There's a new volume of 100 million year button out and there'll be another one in August?
Nice. One of the easiest reads out there for me, All of a sudden you're just sitting there going "Wait, what do you mean it's done?"
Nice. One of the easiest reads out there for me, All of a sudden you're just sitting there going "Wait, what do you mean it's done?"
Arizona is a place that gets hot. It got hot over 100 years ago in Arizona too -- In 1913, a temperature of over 130F was recorded, and there have been many heat waves in the region.
A hot place getting hot when it's usually hot being used as evidence that climate change is real is as asinine as a Republican taking a snowball into the legislature in D. C. in January and using that as evidence it doesn't exist (by proving that a cold place getting cold when it's supposed to be cold).
Even if we give full benefit of the doubt that climate change exists and can be measured, secular long-term cycles such as climate change due to changes in the CO2 in the atmosphere are not measurable from year to year. The amount of average temperature change is predicted as 1.5 degrees per century. This is not measurable directly from year to year because normal variation in weather patterns is greater than this -- take 3 years in a row, and the deviation between those three years is going to be quite large with a mostly gaussian noise component to it. That's why to actually be able to tell that climate change happens you need complex statistical models to counter that natural variability.
Climate deaths are actually way down compared to the pre-postmodern era, in large part due to the appearance of technologies like air conditioning which make homes cooler. This doesn't mean the world is getting cooler obviously, but it means that posting a single data point like "300 dead during the heatwave" is a meaningless statistic.
A hot place getting hot when it's usually hot being used as evidence that climate change is real is as asinine as a Republican taking a snowball into the legislature in D. C. in January and using that as evidence it doesn't exist (by proving that a cold place getting cold when it's supposed to be cold).
Even if we give full benefit of the doubt that climate change exists and can be measured, secular long-term cycles such as climate change due to changes in the CO2 in the atmosphere are not measurable from year to year. The amount of average temperature change is predicted as 1.5 degrees per century. This is not measurable directly from year to year because normal variation in weather patterns is greater than this -- take 3 years in a row, and the deviation between those three years is going to be quite large with a mostly gaussian noise component to it. That's why to actually be able to tell that climate change happens you need complex statistical models to counter that natural variability.
Climate deaths are actually way down compared to the pre-postmodern era, in large part due to the appearance of technologies like air conditioning which make homes cooler. This doesn't mean the world is getting cooler obviously, but it means that posting a single data point like "300 dead during the heatwave" is a meaningless statistic.
Whelp, I have to admit I was wrong, I was sure it was ideological, instead it was just psychological (assuming they're telling the truth)
I mean, it was always going to be a nutjob, but I figured it would be one of the nutjubs who had been listening to the news in addition to the voices in his head.
I mean, it was always going to be a nutjob, but I figured it would be one of the nutjubs who had been listening to the news in addition to the voices in his head.
When the media isn't talking they're lying by not mentioning something. Lies by omission.
Kind of like the toddler-level headlines about Trump's assassination attempt. "There was a pop and Trump got scared and fell down" I mean, it's a literally true description of events, but it's missing a few little details (like the fact there were bullets) that were sort of important to understanding it wasn't just a pop sound and someone getting ascared.
Kind of like the toddler-level headlines about Trump's assassination attempt. "There was a pop and Trump got scared and fell down" I mean, it's a literally true description of events, but it's missing a few little details (like the fact there were bullets) that were sort of important to understanding it wasn't just a pop sound and someone getting ascared.