jfengel

3 ms·

31.
by jfengel 29d ago
I did a bunch of door-knocking, for Obama and Clinton, and it didn't feel like I was doing any good. Everybody had long since made up their minds. It's not like these are hard choices. Either you view the differences as stark and
32.
by jfengel 29d ago
I think software developers feel that their work is never finished. Nothing is ever fully complete. The software always has bugs and security holes. It is always lacking critical features that you haven't gotten around to yet. I think
33.
by jfengel 29d ago
What would you say are the most equivalent parallels from history? I don't see this ending well, but I can't think of anything to compare it to. The canonical answer for an anti-scientific society would be the 16th century Catholi
34.
by jfengel 1mo ago
Buried in the article is something much more interesting than the headline: the book author is coming out as atheist. Well, not atheist, but "humanist". There are zero admitted atheists in congress. A bunch are "unaffiliated&
35.
by jfengel 1mo ago
They see their jobs being done rather badly by people and their bosses replacing them with cheaper talent. Not a rhetorical question: is that their actual lived experience, or is it just what they want to see? How often does it occur tha
36.
by jfengel 1mo ago
Well, duh. People have spent decades cementing their opinion about climate change. That's not going to shift just because we broke the record by an eighth of a degree. Maybe if it were 10 degrees, people might start shifting priorities
37.
by jfengel 1mo ago
The nation is already compromised. That's the point. The time for compromise was before you rolled these things out everywhere, without any thought for the really obvious abuses. You moved fast, broke things, and now nobody is in a moo
38.
by jfengel 1mo ago
I've found that none of the words of the Amendments mean anything like what the dictionary says. If the words "In God We Trust" on the money, and "Under God" in the we're-pretending-it's-not-mandatory pray
39.
by jfengel 1mo ago
Thanks, I hate it. I hate the slant rhyme. Emily Dickinson uses them to great effect, but here it just looks lazy. Petals don't grow on boughs. Leaves grow on boughs. Yes, some trees have flowers, but I don't get a strong visual o
40.
by jfengel 1mo ago
We have long since burned through Trust. We are now burning the second-most valuable resource, Inertia. It takes a long time to unwind a relationship, even when Trust is gone. In fact, the lack of Trust makes it take even longer. And a lot
41.
by jfengel 1mo ago
Certainly, conventional wisdom has been to not be openly racist in public spaces. Turns out the conventional wisdom is wrong. Not only are there tons of people who love it when you're openly racist, but also a lot of people who will
42.
by jfengel 1mo ago
Sort of. The answer is "Yes, and I have decided to devote my time and energy to ensure that nothing is done about it."
43.
by jfengel 1mo ago
That's because of the winner-take-all properties of the tech industry. There's no reason to think that those 5% were smarter or even better-informed than the other 95%. They just happened to be the ones who guessed right, and the
44.
by jfengel 1mo ago
I actually have an idea for getting better voters. Remove the age limits -- on both ends. If you can pull the lever or otherwise unambiguously indicate your choice, you can vote. Obviously this opens up the vote to people who are uneducated
45.
by jfengel 1mo ago
I'm more concerned with how the history books will view us . We voted for this. Twice. He's not imposing his will on America. This is the American will. Even if he himself is fading, as you suggest, he is merely the latest in a
46.
by jfengel 1mo ago
You can't win that race. By the time you've heard that the market is crashing, it has already crashed. The institutional investors will have extracted most of their profits, and you will get a far lower price. The conventional adv
47.
by jfengel 1mo ago
Both "corpora" and "corpuses" are correct. Sometimes we import the plural as an irregular plural in English; sometimes we don't. "Corpora" is common enough that you're not wrong to use it. "Corpu
48.
by jfengel 1mo ago
The article is oddly devoid of specifics. It just calls it bad, without quoting any of the article. The "key takeaway" is not from the article. It's the post's author imputing correlation, into an article that resolutely
49.
by jfengel 1mo ago
The team also tested the ‘meltability’ of the cheese and found that their version, made with vegetable oils, had superior meltability compared to several off-the-shelf coconut oil based cheeses. [...] “It won’t taste any better or worse th
50.
by jfengel 1mo ago
By Niall Ferguson. Which substantially improves my opinion of Ferguson.
51.
by jfengel 1mo ago
The US managed to issue a stamp with clearly the wrong Statue of Liberty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty_Forever_stam... Which presumably everyone in the design process should have recognized, if not p
52.
by jfengel 1mo ago
Heck, I'm pretty sure I am. Or maybe I'm just saying that.
53.
by jfengel 1mo ago
The impression I get is that a lot of people believe that Canada's inability to get a good deal means that it must be a good deal for us. They specifically want a person of bad character, so long as they believe he's on our side.
54.
by jfengel 1mo ago
The debt is a very abstract problem. It's difficult to trace any particular kitchen-table issue to it. The stock market is booming; unemployment is at regular levels. Inflation is higher than economists or consumers want, but it's
55.
by jfengel 1mo ago
The original text is basically useless. They're more like a mission statement rather than directives. They set up broad aspirations, but the implementation has to be aggregated over literally millions of pages of judicial decisions. Ev
56.
by jfengel 1mo ago
Because of the misinformation that led to DOGE cutting funding on programs that saved a lot of lives, but cost almost nothing. People elected the present government based on the lie that the budget could be balanced by cutting things like f
57.
by jfengel 1mo ago
Not the voice of Bart Simpson. A philosopher who wrote a book called "How the Laws of Physics Lie". Now she regrets the title. At the time, it was a useful way to talk about the epistemology of science. Now, that language has be
58.
by jfengel 1mo ago
The tariff fiasco was never a threat to the economy. $200 billion is a drop in the bucket of a $30 trillion dollar debt. It's not great for consumers, but inflation in 2025 was still under 3%. The bigger threat from the tariff fiasco w
59.
by jfengel 1mo ago
No need to editorialize the headline. Original: US retail giant receives $1bn boost from tariff refunds The editorialized version is also incorrect: their income was $30 billion. The extra $1 billion doubles their profit , of $1.04 billi
60.
by jfengel 1mo ago
What he's supposed to do is admit that the abuses were obviously foreseeable, and build in safeguards to prevent them. Or withdraw the system, if he can't. The abusers didn't work for him, but he willingly sold his product to

More ›