jfengel

15 ms·

301.
by jfengel 5mo ago
The entire administration has been built around testing the proposition that the US is the indispensable country. Its supporters believe that we've allowed everybody to take advantage of our good nature, and that if we push back, they
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by jfengel 5mo ago
The entire legal profession needs a reckoning after this. Carroll is not a political figure. She's not tied in to the political parties that close to defend their own. She does not have any of the immunity that politicians get. It may
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by jfengel 5mo ago
Star Trek predicted riots around now because of vast numbers of unemployed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp... A couple of years ago, in fact. We're running late.
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by jfengel 5mo ago
It sounds like you've shifted from hardware purchases to immigration there. The US is indeed still a very popular place to emigrate to, though mostly from poor countries, and it's working very hard to limit immigrants from those c
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by jfengel 5mo ago
If you think that's bad, you should compare the pages for Genghis Khan and Mr. Rogers.
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by jfengel 5mo ago
You don't actually know that. It's too simple a model. Real world data on minimum wages do not bear it out. There are more variables than the graphs you get in the first two weeks of Econ 101. If you make it to the end of the seme
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by jfengel 5mo ago
It's just another thing tossed on the pile. It's not the worst thing, but it doesn't have to be for it to be interesting and relevant.
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by jfengel 5mo ago
Thank you. Yes, exactly. For that matter, reading the Christian scriptures through a historical lens reveals a very different kind of thought than the modern version of Christianity and Judaism. It takes a huge amount of effort to read thes
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by jfengel 5mo ago
There are a lot of deities, and they are far more diverse than you would expect if you're not exposed to them. Even the more atheist countries still seem Christian to Hindus, Confucians, animists, and thousands of other more obscure re
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by jfengel 5mo ago
Much of Western thought traces back to serious work by Church theologians. Even atheists are strongly influenced by the patterns they set down. The Catholic Church, for all its many faults, retains a serious intellectual tradition. (In fact
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by jfengel 5mo ago
I grew up Jewish. I have lost my faith, but that quote is still fundamental to how I see my place in the world.
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by jfengel 5mo ago
Voting for someone else would mean admitting you were wrong. Paying high prices and losing your job are bad, but not as bad as changing your mind.
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by jfengel 5mo ago
That should make it possible to buy a cheap Chinese EV. You can't because they didn't sell out completely. In fact they still have some power to protect the companies from foreign products. The result is a mishmash of protectionis
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by jfengel 5mo ago
Programming languages, like natural languages, are tools for human beings, not computers. They work around the strengths and weaknesses of a human brain. It's not a question of being smart or stupid. It's whether the tool fits the
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by jfengel 5mo ago
For a book/movie with a decent (if optimistic) grasp of genetics, its grasp of chaos theory was utterly ignorant.
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by jfengel 5mo ago
They're a foundation working on "de extinction". They want to hatch dodos.
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by jfengel 5mo ago
And will they? This administration has appointed a significant fraction of judges.
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by jfengel 5mo ago
There are vastly fewer "immigrants for handouts" than right wing media would like you to believe. Coming to the US is incredibly challenging. People who do it are mostly young and wish to work, to support families. Handouts don&#x
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by jfengel 5mo ago
I hear "I'm not anti immigrant, I'm anti illegal immigrant" a lot. To which there is an easy solution: increase the number of legal immigrants we allow. Instead we're doing exactly the opposite, cutting down on lega
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by jfengel 5mo ago
In itself, no, of course not. But it's part of a much larger pattern which together blow apart that whole "great American melting pot" thing that seemed fundamental to the country's prosperity.
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by jfengel 5mo ago
Nestor's book didn't feel right. I don't think he's a crank, or that he's entirely wrong, but the idea that we're breathing wrong feels really unlikely. You don't have to be taught to breathe. I'm sur
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by jfengel 5mo ago
Proper information is readily available, and everyone on social media has been constantly exhorted to avoid scams. At this point if people are being taken in by the really obvious and bald lies, the problem isn't a lack of information.
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by jfengel 5mo ago
Right now, there is a lot of support for candidates who do go out of their way to offend even their most loyal followers. They like the offense, even if it occasionally hurts their own feelings, because it hurts other people more. Politic
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by jfengel 5mo ago
I wish I could share your optimism. But just because a voter has an unfavorable opinion, it doesn't mean that they won't vote for them. Many will choose "the lesser of two evils", and the current administration has devot
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by jfengel 5mo ago
how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this. We have another el
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by jfengel 5mo ago
The brain doesn't do any of that. The brain is neural goo. It can arduously crank through simple logic problems with its ludicrously tiny memory (around 8 bytes). Everything else is intuition and guesswork. You can try to model those h
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by jfengel 5mo ago
Ironic, since they are the oldest senses. The very most primitive cells can do chemotaxis, which eventually evolved into the chemical senses. But it also means sensing chemicals instead of energy, and it's harder to replicate mechanica
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by jfengel 5mo ago
It's going to have to be pain all around, I'm afraid. We are going to have to cut spending, a lot. And even if we eliminated discretionary spending, we'd still have a deficit. The remainder is going to have to come from a com
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by jfengel 5mo ago
OK. But by that calculation everything else returns much less. Many potential investments (CDs, bank accounts, many US government bonds) have negative returns. This is an all-in calculation, in which you get 4% on your money absolutely free
330.
by jfengel 5mo ago
That's not really helping much. Yes, $0 is better than $1, but it's not really saving a ton of money. Eliminating the need to file would be nice. That would save a lot of time. And note that even the poorest filers still pay consi

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