jfengel

35 ms·

781.
by jfengel 8mo ago
They case they're making is that the claim that they're doing it to remove violent criminals is a lie. They're sweeping up everybody, including some American citizens and others who are legally allowed to be here. If it were
782.
by jfengel 8mo ago
Americans like their cars enormous and heavy.
783.
by jfengel 8mo ago
No, the Senate will never convict. Using the military to attack Congress is unlikely. What's stopping him is that the military itself believes pretty firmly in the Constitution. He has control over a lot of top leaders, but there are a
784.
by jfengel 8mo ago
I'm sure they're both helping a best they can, but they are not ginning up opposition from whole cloth. Iranians have a very long list of grievances against a brutal regime.
785.
by jfengel 8mo ago
Any subsequent government isn't likely to be a friend of Israel, either. They might decide to stop actively funding attacks and put the money to better use, but I wouldn't be so sure of that. It's the basis of a lot of ally r
786.
by jfengel 8mo ago
Even setting aside my disagreements with the current President, the US has an atrocious track record when it comes to following through with support. Why on earth would they believe him?
787.
by jfengel 8mo ago
Impeached, possibly. Conviction is effectively impossible. That illustrates the structural problem. Congress was designed to have a high bar for action. But the bar is so high that it can't balance the other branches. I'd argue th
788.
by jfengel 9mo ago
With Congress completely stuck, the executive branch takes over a lot of functions that probably belong to the legislature. I say "probably" because the Constitution isn't really explicit about it, but it's what most p
789.
by jfengel 9mo ago
I agree about the guns. The second amendment doesn't say "except felons". It says "shall not be infringed". Possibly, if there are enough armed felons running about, we might be able to get both sides to the table a
790.
by jfengel 9mo ago
While Charles I was a disaster, Charles II is remembered as a patron of the arts and sciences. He restored the British navy, which went on to be the foundation of the Empire. His personal life was rather too colorful, but a lot of people se
791.
by jfengel 9mo ago
It won't, for the same reason that the hype of non-digital gold is perennial. Economists put the gold standard behind them decades ago. It's practically universally agreed that it's too inflexible to base an economy on. Fans
792.
by jfengel 9mo ago
The context of that quote is interesting. It's a pep talk to the militia. It could be summarized as "Our country is new and so it doesn't suck yet. Go out there and be honorable." https://founders.archives.gov
793.
by jfengel 9mo ago
I thought the entire point of prediction markets was to weed out the dumb opinions by taking all of their money.
794.
by jfengel 9mo ago
Lojban is syntactically unambitious. Semantically it's still just as vague as any natural language.
795.
by jfengel 9mo ago
It's intriguing, but two things. Prospero is conspicuously not a knight. He is a pure scholar; his inability to look outside his books is the reason he got into this mess. Also, Shakespeare had two more native inhabitants of that isl
796.
by jfengel 9mo ago
I'm afraid both are true. And they often go hand in hand. Often, someone calling out an agenda is doing so to sell theirs. (See also "ideology", which is often treated as a synonym.)
797.
by jfengel 9mo ago
It's supposed to be the work of 535 dimwits, but each half of those 535 spends its time ensuring that the other half doesn't get anything done. So the executive branch has assumed a lot of functions that by right belong to the leg
798.
by jfengel 9mo ago
We can run each LLM-produced essay through an LLM to reduce it to bullet points. We can then run it through another LLM to reduce it to a single bullet point. Then we can run it through a final filter, which reduces it to "ai;dr".
799.
by jfengel 9mo ago
The consequences are pretty severe. It's considered wildly unlikely that P=NP. It's like being told that sometimes 2+2 really does equal 5. Effectively everybody thinks about computation gets shot. The fact of proving P=NP is less
800.
by jfengel 9mo ago
If the doctors did indeed put pressure on her to have surgery, and were not in keeping with the WPATH standards of care, then they have committed malpractice. But if they did, and Aldaco is simply suing them because she's unhappy and l
801.
by jfengel 9mo ago
Ah, Soren Aldaco, the right's favorite "detransitioner". Soren had a bad experience therefore everything trans people say is wrong. If her doctors did indeed pressure her into making decisions that were wrong for her, then th
802.
by jfengel 9mo ago
It's entirely possible. I haven't heard concrete accusations of them messing with these numbers, but they're clearly doing it with other numbers.
803.
by jfengel 9mo ago
When I finally decided to watch B5 for the first time, season 1 was so bad that I literally turned it off and stared at the ceiling. (I was stuck in bed due to an injury.) Eventually, somebody curated a couple of season 1 episodes and told
804.
by jfengel 9mo ago
Of course they did. The surprising part is that it hasn't resulted in more inflation. We just got new figures; inflation was 2.4% last month. For all of 2025, inflation was 2.7%. Those aren't great numbers, of course, but they&#x2
805.
by jfengel 9mo ago
The CIA and FBI had been deliberately separated, after the Church Commission found many, many abuses. The Patriot Act removed and lowered many of the barriers. And now we're back to what the Church Commission found.
806.
by jfengel 9mo ago
"Lunar New Year" is perhaps over-general, since there are non-Asian lunar calendars, such as the Hebrew and Islamic calendars. That said, "Lunar New Year" is probably as good a compromise as any, since we have other name
807.
by jfengel 9mo ago
I've never met a lawyer who believes that. To a lawyer, justice requires agreement on the laws, rather than individual notions of justice. If the law is unjust, it's up to the lawmaking body to fix that. I hear this from lawyers o
808.
by jfengel 9mo ago
The math is hard, but I don't think that's the problem. Hard math eventually succumbs. I think that even if AI were to find a good unification of GR and QM, we wouldn't be able to test it. We might accept it without additiona
809.
by jfengel 9mo ago
I don't see why there has to be a "gap" at all. The country had half as many people in 1950, and it got along fine. The world is different now, but I don't see why it takes 300 million people to run the country today. If
810.
by jfengel 9mo ago
Their data only goes up to 2022. It's astonishing that three years could possibly make an enormous difference in such a long-term trend, but we'll have to wait for newer data to confirm it. (They should have at least mentioned it

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