I think it’s part of a psuedo-religious death cult thing trying to force the apocalypse to happen. War and Death are easy. They’re hard at work on Famine and Pestilence.

Unironically, Street Fighter. That scene where he says, “For you, the day Bison graced your village was one of the most important days of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.”

I think about it a lot in dealing with other people. It was supposed to make him sound like even more of a jerk, but I actually think it’s a good commentary on what it’s like to deal with the public. Imagine being a doctor. Sometimes, you get to deliver good news. Sometimes bad. Sometimes you can do something, and sometimes you just can’t. If the doctor tried to care as much as the patients, they’d be emotionally destroyed in short order. For them, it HAS to just be a Tuesday.

The numbers feel too coincidental and so a theory like space-based voting machine fraud doesn’t seem as outlandish as it should. At the same time, it attributes to these people a level of finesse and planning that I just don’t see from them.

The brute force “suppress votes and lie constantly” is much more Trump’s style. It’s basically his whole brand.

To be honest… If tomorrow WINE was 100% perfect, we’d probably see laptops start moving the direction of phones and it would be terrible for consumers. You’d get your AceOS on your Acer laptop and DellSys on your Dell and so on and they’d all have little marketplaces where you could install LibreOffice next to an ad for some other office suite that costs $100 for some reason and that’s all people would know.

Yes, techy people would have more options but for the average consumer, they have no idea what an OS is. Many don’t know what Windows is. They don’t care or want to care. If presented with the average Linux install screen, supposing they could make it that far by figuring out how to make a bootable flash drive, they’d freak out at all the options and information presented. They’re at the mercy of the manufacturer, and the manufacturer will want to squeeze out every last dollar, and being given control over the OS would be terrible.

AI could probably find the occasional actual bug. If you use AI to file 500 bug reports in the time it may take a researcher to find and report 1, and only 2 pay out, you’ve still gotten ahead.

But in the process, you’ve wasted tons of time for the developers who have to actually sort through, read the reports, and verify the validity of the issue. I think that’s part of the problem. Even if it sometimes finds a legitimate issue, these people are trying to make it someone else’s problem to do the real work.

I used to like trailers. But just as I was starting to feel like the trailers were getting too long, the new thing became to splice the trailers with ads. So you think you’re watching trailers and then suddenly there’s a Ford commercial. So now they’re too long AND they’re less entertaining and relevant.

This. IF these generalizations are actually true it still doesn’t mean what he thinks it means. I also find the bit about “being strict” particularly gross. If it’s valid workspace criticism, then there’s no laws protecting women from it. So he clearly means something more like “I want to yell and insult and be a little dictator but women might report a hostile work environment.”

Yeah but have you seen the state of things? One man’s absurdist joke is apparently another man’s deeply held belief right now.

It sounds like Hollywood tech lingo. Like when you’re watching a movie or a TV show and the designated techy character starts just saying computer words that make no actual sense in the real world, but I guess in CSI: Idiottown the hard drives have severe overheating issues.

You’d be dismayed to find out how often I’ve seen people do that.

It’s been a long time but I recall a study featured on Freakonomics where a national park tried different signs to get people to not steal rocks. Signs like, “Taking rocks hurts the ecosystem” and “Taking rocks is a crime.”

The only effective one was something along the lines of, “A million people visit this park every year and leave things alone.” Suggesting that telling people to do the right thing is less effective than peer pressure.

Sigh. The hope was fun while it lasted. He’s too anti-capitalist for the right and too problematic for the left so no side will claim him, and they’ll just devolve into claiming it was the other side for a bit before not caring anymore. No revolution to be found here, just more sadness.

I knew healthcare was messed up but I legit didn’t know how messed up until it happened to me. My daughter got put on a specialty medicine because of a relatively rare kidney condition. It had to be compounded, because she is a small child but the medicine only came in adult doses.

Aetna denied coverage, stating I had to get the medicine from CVS (which is owned by the same parent company of Aetna). CVS does not compound medicine, so we couldn’t get it from them. I spent almost a full year on the phone arguing with them and around $6000 paying out of pocket before I was able to switch insurances.

I consider myself reasonable. Even in a functioning system, mistakes can happen and need to be resolved, and I spent the first month or more assuming this was just an innocent mistake. What got to me was the total lack of recourse. Day after day on the phone with people, some of whom genuinely seemed to care but could do nothing. They intentionally separate the patients from the people making decisions so that all the decision makers get is a few fields in a form, not the whole story. The people in charge are even more separated so they never have to hear anything about the people they’re screwing over. And if I couldn’t afford the extra $6000 burden, I just wouldn’t have gotten the medicine and in the best case she would have spent that year in and out of the hospital and in the worst she wouldn’t have survived the year.

I tend to think most people are decent. But the system we’ve built makes sure to separate people by impenetrable layers of bureaucracy to ensure that the decent people either can’t do anything or never know there’s a problem, while the indecent never have to be confronted with the damage they do. It’s insane.

I think about this sometimes but the challenges for direct democracy are very hard to overcome. To vote right now, you go to a place and someone verifies your identity and then you vote on a machine that should theoretically have not just your vote but some form of backup to ensure your vote is counted.

Obviously this would get really obnoxious if you were voting constantly. So something like change.org maybe where people can propose things and others can vote on them. But now how do we handle identity verification, and ensuring only one vote per person? On something connected to the Internet, how do we verify security? This needs to be even more secure than a bank, as every hacker and government in the world will want to sway the results.

We could maybe distribute something like a USB key to cryptographically ensure everyone’s identity, but then you will need to handle people losing theirs, or theft, and it wouldn’t work great with cell phones. There’s other identity solutions like scanning documents or facial ID but they have their own security issues and also are a nightmare for privacy.

I dunno. There’s probably a solution out there that might work, but it would take a lot of work to make it trustworthy and that work would largely be overseen by people the system is meant to replace so they aren’t exactly incentivized to get it right.

I hate when people downplay the economy or employment as trivial or at least not very important. It is important, and for many it is rational to consider it the most important. At an individual level in America, employment means food, shelter, healthcare. It even means companionship… People who can’t afford to date, have a harder time finding love.

At a high level, even if we implemented universal healthcare and fixed our other problems, the health of the economy would STILL dictate our access to food, shelter, and healthcare. A government with no funds cannot sustain programs.

I just picked a state. Average infant daycare cost is $1172/mo. Maximum of 4 infants per caregiver, so a maximum of $4.688.

Health insurance here averages $400/mo, for an individual (some often paid by the employer).

Assuming they are employed, the employer is paying for federal unemployment insurance, workers compensation insurance, state unemployment insurance. It was really hard to get solid numbers but based on my reading, we can estimate about 2% will go to that.

So we have $4296 left over. Assuming payroll and supplies and everything else costs nothing at all (which is definitely not accurate), and assuming we give the rest straight to the employee… Their gross would be $51,000 roughly.

The average daycare worker in this state makes about $33k/year.

This is legit the movie I shit on most. I hate it so very much. It’s not the plot exactly, it’s two things:

• The tech accuracy is so bad. I won’t go into everything but they go out of their way to say shit that doesn’t make sense. My favorite example is that the AI is just a big floating orb and they feed it data through infrared, the slowest communication method available. Like they didn’t have to say infrared, they chose that.

• The product placement. Again, a lot of examples but my favorite is how at the end he shows up with Guitar Hero and the kids are like “Yay Guitar Hero that’s the best game ever.”

Contraception is not perfect. If you are on birth control, and you take it every day, you can still get pregnant, it’s just unlikely. If you have an IUD, you can still get pregnant, and even worse every pregnancy is more likely to be life threatening. And of course, condoms can break.

As for having less sex … that’s an interesting thing to say …

I think of it exactly in terms of the trolley problem. The whole premise is that if you do nothing (don’t vote) more people die. By flipping the lever, fewer people die but you’ve taken an action that leads directly to their deaths. The philosophical question isn’t just “is it better for fewer people to die” but “in pulling the lever, are you directly responsible for those deaths?”

My answer would be that inaction is itself an action. In this scenario, you have found yourself responsible either way. Suppose you pull the lever, though, to save as many lives as you can… Wouldn’t the ones who die as a result of this have loved ones that absolutely do blame you?

So your argument is “it doesn’t literally say that to the letter, so you’re wrong?” At best it suggests that this relatively wide swath of the population shouldn’t vote. What’s your interpretation?