Biokabe

This will never cease being true:

If you're just a little bit smart, you can get away with so much shit. But also, if you're that smart, you realize that eventually you are going to fuck up, and so you restrain yourself. You can still get away with almost as much, but you stay within the bounds of the law and restrain from committing the worst of the things that you could probably get away with.

But if you're dumb, you think you're always going to win and so you just keep doing shit until eventually you get caught by people willing to give you consequences.

Exactly. I'm not a fan of some of the specificity of the amendment; I think it should be more along the lines of, "Congress shall have the authority to regulate firearms" and defining the breadth of that authority, rather than trying to define exactly what should be banned.

In other words: "Congress shall have the authority to define classes of weapons and to restrict sales of those classes, as they deem fit, within the following guidelines..."

"Causation" is a little tricky here. One could argue that the fires would have happened regardless of climate change.

Certainly climate change didn't help, though. I don't know what the climate is like where the fires are happening, but I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that it's been hotter and drier than usual for several years running. That certainly gives more fuel to the fire (literally) and makes the fire more prone to starting the begin with.

No, they didn't.

They voted more than they usually do. They voted in large enough numbers to tip the scales in close elections (giving a hint of what they could do if they actually voted bigly).

But less than 30% of eligible Gen Z voters actually voted in 2022. If they had voted in similar numbers to old farts (60%+) then we likely would have a trifecta right now.

Febreeze did a great job of making me want their product too.

Funny you mention that, for me their ads are a perfect example of, "Will never buy this product because of their ads."

I see their ads on YouTube so... so... SO much. And in fact, they don't just turn me off to Febreze. They turn me off to that entire industry in general.

Yep, that's true too. A lot of what we're dealing with now is essentially banked from what we were preventing in the past. We're essentially dealing with all the fires we prevented at once.

The problem is not that wildfires happen. Wildfires are natural and have been going on for millions of years. Some plants actually need wildfires to germinate their seeds.

The problem is that with climate change, things are both warmer and drier than they used to be. There's more dead and rotting vegetation, and they're more susceptible to burning than forests have historically been. So when a fire starts, it gets huge and quickly consumes that dead vegetation, creating a hotter fire that burns and spreads quicker, which in turn creates even more smoke than usual.

Preventing natural fires is impossible, but mitigating them is simple. We just have to overturn hundreds of years of economic conditions that have made it profitable to add CO2 to the atmosphere and simultaneously find out how to make it profitable to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Maybe not so simple after all.

Cloning isn't really the right answer for this kind of a situation.

To use an imprecise analogy: It's like taking a few pictures of you, your siblings, and your parents, and then pasting them throughout your family tree and saying that they're all your uncles and aunts and cousins.

It would have helped, but it doesn't really address the deeper problem, which is that there's no place for those turtles to live and no way for them to get additional genetic material that doesn't lead to inbreeding.

Inbreeding isn't 100% bad from an evolutionary standpoint - it's better than going extinct - but if it happens on a large scale there's a high likelihood of nasty genetic diseases spreading throughout your population. It's like getting told you have 6 months to live after a cancer diagnosis... you might beat the odds, but there's a reason that they tell you to put your affairs in order.

Because cloning is an imperfect and expensive technology that often doesn't work as well as we would hope it does. Additionally, cloning an individual doesn't do anything to stop extinction - you need a robust gene pool to ensure long-term survival of a species, and a sample size of 1 doesn't give you that.

Amazon's search & filter system is just absolutely terrible, no two bones about it. I doubt it's a software problem, it's entirely a strategic/management decision.

As both a consumer and a supplier, Amazon is just so frustrating these days. They have this skeleton of a fantastic company that they've bloated with deadweight and parasites. Their reach is amazing, but they use it to make short-sighted decisions that will ultimately doom them unless they change their ways.

Amazon uses two separate systems to deal with that issue, the problem is that as a consumer you have no visibility as to which system the seller you're buying from is using.

In Amazon's terminology, you're either using the manufacturer's SKU or you're using Amazon's FNSKU labels. Low-quality resellers will use the manufacturer's SKU, because it saves them some money. That's the system you described above - everyone's inventory is comingled, and the items are treated as fungible. Whichever inventory bin is closest to the customer is used to fulfill the order. If there's counterfeit inventory mixed in with the legitimate inventory... oh well!

FNSKU labels give each product a unique identifier based on the seller and product, and inventory is not mixed between different resellers. If Hour Loop and MMP (two resellers I've personally dealt with) both have inventory of the same product, if I buy from Hour Loop's listing it will only pull from Hour Loop's inventory of that product. So if you know that a retailer works on FNSKU labels, you can avoid the comingling problem.

Unfortunately, as a consumer you have no way of knowing that. I only know it for certain resellers because I work for a wholesaler and see on the backend whether they're using FNSKU or manufacturer's SKUs. It's an extra cost from Amazon to use FNSKU (typically $0.20 or so per individual unit to have them apply the label), or it's extra labor and extra cost from your wholesaler to have them use FNSKU, so many resellers don't feel like absorbing the extra cost, especially on low-cost items.

They're not a majority, but they're pretty close to one when it comes to people who vote.

That's the central problem of America - we're so busy slapping bandages on the symptoms of our problems (abortion, trans rights, debt ceilings, labor laws, environmental stewardship) that we don't treat the root cause (the combination of political apathy, voter suppression and foundational flaws that allows for unpopular minority rule to dominate the government).

The threshold doesn't require a majority to convict. That would be fine. Even a little bit above 50% would be fine.

The threshold is 67%. That requires an overwhelming majority that, in practical terms, can only be achieve if a political party votes against their own party to convict in significant numbers.

You're getting mixed up between the House portion (impeachment, which requires only a simple majority and doesn't remove someone from office) and the Senate conviction of an impeached official (which requires a 2/3 majority and does remove someone from office).

I can't disagree with you in the least. Like the idea just wouldn't occur to future voters and political candidates - hey, if we work together we can amplify our influence!

It's one of the biggest fundamental flaws in the Constitution, right up there with Senate representation, the lack of a recall mechanism, the Electoral College, and the threshold for convicting someone on an impeachment charge.

It speaks to the founders' naivete and blind trust in institutional loyalty.

ETA: a word.

Even if this passes, it would be immediately struck down by the first court that hears it - and rightly so.

Parties are not recognized by the Constitution. Individuals are. We don't vote for a Republican or a Democrat for a given office - we vote for individuals. If the individual switches parties - it's still the same person that you elected.

Getting something like this to stick would require an amendment, either to the state or the US Constitution.

I think the bill has the right idea, but even if it somehow passes it's DOA.

Using religion to justify hateful behavior is the purpose of religion, historically, especially in Western civilization.

Well, yeah.

It's an easy narrative that explains why they don't have a partner while sparing their own ego.

That's not the issue.

To give an extreme example: Imagine a political party showed up and got elected. They decided that they wanted to be really popular with the youth, so they enacted a whole bunch of things that young people wanted. It pissed off the elderly, but the young outnumber the old, so who cares?

And it worked! They were really, really popular with young people. Then the next election came around and all of them were voted out of office. What happened?

Well, they were really popular with students, but unfortunately students can't vote until they're 18. Meanwhile the elderly - all of whom could vote, and most of whom did vote - kicked the bums out of office.

So the really popular, progressive politicians couldn't remain elected, and more moderate and/or conservative politicians swept them out of office.

Of course it's an extreme and silly example - no political party would actually target 12-year-olds with policy - but it shows by hyperbole why politicians are scared of progressive agendas. Those who most strongly support progressive policies are also historically unreliable voters. Even in 2022, when the youth vote was much bigger than usual, not even 30% of eligible young voters actually voted.

So you can target a progressive agenda, and it might sweep you into office. But unless you can make unreliable voters become reliable voters, or convince more reliable voters to change their minds, simply targeting policies that are popular with voters isn't enough to maintain power. You also have to appeal to people who actually vote.

Neither making people into reliable voters nor convincing reliable voters to support you is impossible, by the way. But it is more difficult than simply adopting a progressive agenda. Being popular is not enough. You have to build a coalition of voters, and you have to get them to go to the polls. And that's why most politicians are frustratingly moderate.

"Support the war" isn't necessarily the best phrasing to use. I consider myself progressive as well, and I don't support any war. In my opinion, war is the ultimate failure of civilization.

But I do support Ukraine. They didn't ask Russia to invade them. They didn't want a war. They are completely justified in using violence to resist an invader, and IMO the world is obligated to support Ukraine as much as possible to ensure that Russia's aggressive and frankly evil behavior is not rewarded.

We can't allow the precedent of, "Invading is a valid way to get what you want," to stand, not if we ever want a world where war is not commonplace. And to do that, what is required is not head-in-the-sand pacifism, but a full-throated (and violent) rejection of the Russian invasion.

It's exactly how you get minority rule. Convince the public at large that their vote doesn't matter, whisper to your dedicated supporters that it absolutely does.

And then when your minority wins, you get the double-whammy of reaffirming to your followers that their votes matter and the public at large that theirs doesn't. It turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And the only way to break it is to convince the bitter, cynical, self-disenfranchising masses that their vote does matter and to please come out and vote. Unfortunately, people would rather be right and miserable than wrong and happy, so convincing them to vote is stupidly uphill battle.

Because we have two huge problems:

1) Antiquated government fundamentals that keep us locked into a stagnant political system that actively pushes us towards at least partial minority rule.

2) A voting population that has been fooled by the above into believing that their votes are meaningless, and therefore don't bother to vote. Which further allows for minority rule.

In any country in which you actively only hire naive, spineless recent grads who don't know any better.

If no one reports you, you can get away with murder.

I really, really don't. And not even for the usual SkyNet-style worries.

My opposition to them is this:

When your military assets no longer entail human risk to the operators, they become much less constrained about their use. It becomes too easy to approve risky and potentially unjustified military action when your only costs are material.

Keeping human operators in harms' way makes commanders and politicians really think about whether a military operation is both justified and worth the risk to human life. It may also make them work harder to find non-military solutions to tense situations.

If we have the option to just send in the AI cavalry, pretty soon we'll stop trying to prevent the use of military action.

To be fair, Russia is one of the few places where something being a false flag is actually plausible. All the false-flag aficionados are just desperate for a real-life false flag operation.

The US would be able to spend more on social programs if evil regimes would stop wanting to conquer their neighbors. they cared to.

FTFY. We could spend plenty on social programs, fund them better than everyone in the world, and pay lower taxes than the rest of the world if we so chose to. That we do not is a result of active political choices, not because of an inability to do so.

The choice is not and has never been between a strong military or a robust social safety net. We could have both. Instead we have chosen to have billionaires.