jfengel

7 ms·

91.
by jfengel 2mo ago
In a lot of ways, the same happened in the Soviet Union. The poor farmers were never socialists. Socialism was imposed on them by upper-middle-class intellectuals. The poor farmers wanted to stop being serfs, but only so that they could own
92.
by jfengel 2mo ago
I don't like getting wrapped up in lexicography, but any meaningful definition of socialism has to include government ownership of the means of production. What the super-rich want is government protection for them, but they don't
93.
by jfengel 2mo ago
That also includes self-described supporters of socialism, who almost always mean something closer to social democracy. They tend to point to places like Scandinavia, who are absolutely capitalist. They just have better social safety nets.
94.
by jfengel 2mo ago
Except of course nobody is ever exonerated by that kind of investigation. If they find nothing of interest, they'll just insist that the incriminating information is elsewhere, and issue more subpoenas. If he's lucky they won&#x27
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by jfengel 2mo ago
They even got the poles. It's pretty impressive that they managed that without anybody catching them at it. And without getting themselves caught on the cameras themselves. That must have required some planning and practice.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
I kinda barely understand that. I really appreciate you writing it. Thank you.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
And here I was hoping they would finally be taking up the complaint about Ea-nāṣir.
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by jfengel 2mo ago
Oh. Then why do you want it? Is CNN going to be a great profit center for you? That seems unlikely. Practically all genuine news sources are struggling. The only ones that succeed are propaganda outlets masquerading as news, because they&#x
99.
by jfengel 2mo ago
That seems an odd comparison. Theranos was complete vaporware. You've seen Starship; it goes into space and comes down in a controlled fashion. Maybe it won't work out; they've certainly had a lot of problems. But why compare
100.
by jfengel 2mo ago
They spent all last year lowering rates, which struck me as insane. Unemployment was only slightly above target (4.4%). Inflation was already well above target, at 2.7%. Stock markets certainly didn't need any additional support. The 2
101.
by jfengel 2mo ago
Headline is kinda misleading, even in its original form. The closure occurred in 2021. The "says" in the headline refers to something that happened now, where they told a judge why it closed the accounts. They had said that many t
102.
by jfengel 2mo ago
Star Wars was in fact always mainstream. Everybody loved it, not just the nerds. It made epic sums of money. They had stormtroopers on freaking Donny and Marie. The nerds responded by making their own niche of it, via action figures and b
103.
by jfengel 2mo ago
I'm saying the amount of crap is the same, but it used to be all our crap and not crap targeted at 12 year old Korean girls or 77 year old Uruguayan grandmas. It was more special, to us specifically. But I'm claiming that the amou
104.
by jfengel 2mo ago
We have just about the cheapest gasoline in the developed world. Partly because we make it here, and partly because we refuse to raise taxes on it. (The federal tax was last raised in 1993. It has be 18 cents per gallon ever since.) If gas
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by jfengel 2mo ago
It is remarkable that a US company had an enormous lead in BEVs for a decade. Then they just kinda stopped innovating, and slid backwards.
106.
by jfengel 2mo ago
They have the option of simply putting it on their books, but that is the very last option. They would rather borrow it. Sometimes they borrow it from themselves at artificially low rates, which is still better than simply not treating it a
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by jfengel 2mo ago
There was also .001% of the content there is now. The Internet of 2000 was microscopic. Now everyone can create content, without any of the friction of hosting it. The vast majority of it is crap, but that was always the case. The main diff
108.
by jfengel 2mo ago
Nah. Cyclospora is a parasite, not a virus. [Riffing on the gag, not an actual misunderstanding, just to be clear.]
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by jfengel 2mo ago
The black hole has more energy inside it than the component parts. That energy includes the gravitational binding energy, which is not "inside" of the black hole. It never passed through the event horizon to get there. So when the
110.
by jfengel 2mo ago
Aren't all movie theater bulbs as hot as the sun? The color temperature is around 6,000K. But "15kW" is certainly saying something. That's about 1/3 as much as your house receives. That is, three screening rooms use
111.
by jfengel 2mo ago
Yes. Cocaine is a problem. We should deal with it much, much better than we are. But it's nowhere near as big a problem as the complete disintegration of our government. We simply cannot allow the government to kill people on a whim. A
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by jfengel 2mo ago
I'm surprised it's that low. It's a bi-partisan issue. Both sides believe that the other is trying to manipulate the election.
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by jfengel 3mo ago
If I thought the administration was playing four-dimensional chess, I'd hypothesize that this was a prelude to saying "See, our allies won't help us, so all of our bashing them is justified". But the administration doesn
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by jfengel 3mo ago
For some reason I think of "capsize" as synonymous with "sink", but dictionaries disagree with me. They say it means "to turn over" (possibly etymologically related to caput "head", as in "to t
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by jfengel 3mo ago
You can go to the BLS data and see what has gone up, what has gone down, and what has changed about the calculaton. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/data.htm
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by jfengel 3mo ago
Enormous. Wiles' proof is 129 pages long, and builds on results that require a vast amount of infrastructure to define. It's going to take dozens of person-years.
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by jfengel 3mo ago
If this were because of the dollar, then everything would inflate the same way. The US is experiencing inflation, but nowhere near to this degree. American inflation right now is driven largely by the increase in oil prices, which figure in
118.
by jfengel 3mo ago
I don't realize that, and neither does any Republican in government. As has been said many times, Republicans want government to be just small enough to fit inside your uterus. Nobody has bought the idea that Republicans are libertaria
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by jfengel 3mo ago
> I have no idea what this means. The World Wide Web itself is quite literally hypermedia. I think he's saying that the Web is hypermedia plus Javascript, rather than just hypermedia. Which means, from the standpoint of the power of
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by jfengel 3mo ago
While they are clearly leading this war for their own purposes, both require the support of a governing apparatus (the Republican and Likud party bureaucrats) who have their own motivations. Those motivations are not necessarily positive, b

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