jfengel

6 ms·

61.
by jfengel 2mo ago
As you say, it's xenophobia, but you have to take account that the "xeno" includes American liberals as well. Right wings define the "us" as "the people who use oil and gas". That was what made the country
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by jfengel 2mo ago
I wish them luck on that. Because the airwaves are a public resource, courts have generally given wide latitude to restrict how they are used. This is on journalistic grounds rather than general free speech grounds, so maybe they'll be
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by jfengel 2mo ago
I don't think anyone believes that age is a perfect proxy. Just that it is good enough, and that any better solution is either much more difficult or impossible.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
I really don't believe that they are. Historically, communities raised children, and leaving everything up to parents is an anomaly.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
The President may well consider this some kind of daring exploit, and is proud of it. The article suggests that he was playing up the danger beforehand.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Under ordinary circumstances, no. But these are not ordinary circumstances. This is the collapse of the country that is the center of the tech universe. More than a few on HN are supporters of the administration. The frustration of HN users
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Academic argument, same as any other field. The problem is that you're citing people known for their popularisation, not academic work. None of that is subject to the kind of critique that happens between academics.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
People really don't get how poorly freshman philosophy presents the field. It's not even a survey of an introduction to a prologue. So every passing thought feels like "philosophy".
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Ideally, it's less "redistribute billionaires' wealth" so much as "figure out what parts of the system allow some people to accumulate money orders of magnitude more than the effort they've put in, and tune the
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by jfengel 2mo ago
My friend Tom hasn't gotten in touch for a while.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
It won't fool all of the people all of the time. But it succeeds often enough to pass the loose definition. It does many things that we called "AI complete" for decades. It is also clear that is is also not really aware, eith
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by jfengel 2mo ago
That 3°C by 2050 figure comes from one particular group of German scientists. It is not the broad consensus, which is that we'll reach 3°C by around 2100. Either scenario is obviously terrible and we need to begin to deal with it firml
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Not many. And even fewer would make a different choice, given the opportunity. Change will rely entirely on people who sat out 2024. The question is how much regret they feel. Cynically, I assume most people would rather alter their world-v
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by jfengel 2mo ago
A lot of people cited Gaza as an example of "evil" by the last administration. I can have a small amount of sympathy for that. What was happening there was indeed harrowing. But only a small amount. It's one issue of many, an
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Do any other countries teach it? I'd be curious to know how such a curriculum works. I have dark suspicions that it would be difficult to implement in the US, because of existing divisiveness. One side or the other would likely see suc
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Error bars would be misleading, because this isn't a sampling error. These start with actual counts. The more important errors are systematic: the definitions of terms, the reporting mechanisms, etc. Except that those things are consta
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Or at least, the tech-bro subset of the general population. It's possible that they're disproportionately vocal on HN, but I think overall it's a reasonably accurate presentation of that (narrow but powerful) demographic.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
But they didn't drown the government in a bathtub. They cut a bunch of tiny programs that they were ideologically opposed to, at a savings amounting to a rounding error. All of the things that could be counted as "big government&q
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Democracy is only ever choosing between two evils. You will never agree entirely with either candidate. In order to reach a majority, you will have to reach some kind of compromise with people with goals you hate. As has been famously sta
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by jfengel 2mo ago
It was a majority of voters. If you include all of the non-voters as tacitly consenting to it, then it's an overwhelming majority. That's not entirely accurate; quite a few non-voters were prevented from voting in one way or anoth
81.
by jfengel 2mo ago
No, we're not expecting someone else to stop it. We voted for this. The evil is not imposed on us. It is us. Not everyone, but a majority. The minority is looking for ways to stop it, but it requires getting literally everyone else to
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by jfengel 2mo ago
As Republican commentator Bill Buckley put it, "A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop." The rest of the quote is actually about how it's meant to give people time to think, but it has clearly beco
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by jfengel 2mo ago
You can always tell a director who does do their own storyboards. The film is always visually bats**. In a good way. I'm looking at you, Guillermo del Toro.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
It's kinda the reverse. The ones with the most motivation to get crypto rolling are the ones seeking to circumvent the law. For most people, even in the best case crypto is breakeven for them. They'd use it if it were easy, but th
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Depends on what "low mass" means. An earth-mass black hole lasts 10^50 years. A black hole the mass of Mount Everest lasts 10^21 years. Black holes on the order of metric tons would have evaporated by now. But primordial black hol
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by jfengel 2mo ago
I did at last see a Cybertruck carrying a thing. An easy chair, I think. I had never seen one with its bed cover off before. I wasn't certain that a Cybertruck could actually carry things. This clearly wasn't a contractor, but it
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by jfengel 2mo ago
No, because "devaluation" means something different. Devaluation is about currency. Inflation is about consumer prices. Devaluation of the currency generally raises customer prices, but that's only a fraction of what happens.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Headline buries the real lede. The thesis is that it proves the effectiveness of Modern Monetary Theory. Except that's not really news. We've been deficit-spending for decades, which is what's happening now. MMT isn't su
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by jfengel 2mo ago
The Act is consistent with a legislative intent to target drag shows that are obscene for children, not drag shows writ large. True. But since drag shows that are "obscene for children" tend to be held late at night, in bars wit
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Sorry to hear that. Did you have a better reaction to the protein subunit vaccine (Novavax)?

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