Do you know how hard it is to get a doctor to tie your tubes together?
I know one woman who was in a position where being pregnant would be dangerous, and they still made her go through therapy sessions to check that she was really sure.
Conversely, my vesctomy was “you know that’s permanent, right? Ok, I’ll get you a referral.” A 30 minute chat with a urologist after that about the details, and then we scheduled it.
Measles also resets your immune system for every other thing your body already learned to deal with. No, it would not be fucking better.
So much of the criticism focuses on Starship, specifically. Starship has never claimed to be anything other than a test program. Look back into the history of NASA test programs and you’ll fine lots of exploded pieces of rockets. Starship is also moving along a whole lot better than the SLS at a comparable stage of the development track. People bleating about this clearly don’t have a lot of knowledge about rockets and their history.
Safety is somewhat valid. Obviously, exploding rockets over the Gulf of Mexico is not a good thing, but the chances of debris actually hitting a plane are minuscule. See Big Sky Theory, which is the basis for a lot of air traffic policy. It’s just that the aviation industry has extremely tight safety standards, and so they divert planes.
Falcon 9 also exists, and now has a better track record than Soyuz (the previous gold standard). People making these arguments seem to conveniently leave that out.
Now, environmental standards, how Musk is trying to gut NASA and the FAA, and how the company never would have survived without government subsidies? Yes, absolutely focus on those. Also, the fact that SpaceX employees are mostly insulated from their idiot CEO. They’re the real heroes of the company.
In a different Administration, I think SpaceX should be nationalized and run something like the USPS or Amtrak. NASA shouldn’t make their own rockets anymore. They’re really bad at making anything close to cost effective.
My favorite story from the Obamacare debacle:
The exchanges were meant for people without an employer who has health coverage to get that coverage on their own. Members of Congress and their staff are employees of the federal government, which obviously provides health insurance. They normally wouldn’t have access to the exchanges.
Enter Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who figures Democrats are setting up an awful system on purpose that they would never subject themselves to because they Hate America™. Thinking he’ll call their bluff, he introduces an amendment to specifically opt Congress into the exchanges.
Except it’s not a bluff, and Democrats think that’s a pretty great idea.
After the ACA gets passed, Republicans run against their own amendment, twisting the facts around to claim Congress opted themselves out of Obamacare.
This exactly, and more people need to understand it. A one day boycott of Amazon doesn’t do much to Amazon, especially since many people will simply defer spending to the next day. What it does do is give a simple goal for people to participate who haven’t done this sort of thing before. Then you expand it to longer time periods and more targets.
Maybe this time.
The policies of the Nazi party took a while to fully implement. Even after the Enabling Act, it took a while before anyone felt it. With each dumb policy, fascists need to double down on blaming outside actors. They have to do this, because this is the only way they can cover for their failures.
The problem this time is they are implementing three years of policy changes per week. It happened too fast, and their attempts to blame others aren’t taking root.
More generally, people should be more aware of how things are different in this regime compared to 1930s Germany. The comparison is obvious, but we’ll miss opportunities if we think everything is the same.
Trump is dumb as shit, but there’s several people behind him who aren’t.
You absolutely should not do that. The most robust, proven, long term strategies show that trying to time the market doesn’t work. Sticking with the sp500 index, with a mix of risk hedges adjusted over decades, is robust and proven. The best stock market advice is really boring.
There is absolutely nothing inevitable about technological change. We think that way because of the specific place we are in history. A specific place that is an aberration in how fast those changes have come. For the most part, humans throughout history have used much the same techniques and tools that their parents did.
You also can’t separate AI technology from the social change. They’re not dumping billions into data centers and talking about using entire nuclear reactors to power them just because they think AI is a fun toy.
Was there anything in the posts above mine that suggest this was a technical issue, or did you read that in as an assumption?
Every time a significant change in technology comes about, there is a significant impact to jobs. The printing press destroyed the livelihood of scribes, but it made books dramatically cheaper, which created new jobs for typesetters, booksellers, etc.
Take a look at the history of the first people called “Luddites”. They were early socialists focusing on the dismal working conditions that new automation would bring to the workers. And they were correct.
Not every technological change is good. Our society has defaulted to saying yes to every change, and it’s caused a whole lot of problems.
Useful idiot is close to figuring out they’re a useful idiot.
There are several countries that have FPTP voting, but they’re not as entrenched at everywhere into two parties the way the US is. The UK, for example, has several regions where one of the two major parties is mostly fighting against a regional party, and the other major party has little to no voting base there.
Not only that, but several southern states have used instant runoff voting since the end of Reconstruction (or not long after). If you look at the makeup of their legislatures over the past 100+ years, you’ll see that they are just as filled with Democrats and Republicans as everywhere else.
Point is, FPTP is not the only thing at play.
They almost immediately switched to attacking trans people. They must be able to focus on some external group as being The Enemy, but they took a sudden loss on gay rights and they saw how deeply unpopular their position really was. Immediate switch to talking about bathroom bans and women’s sports. They even peeled off a section of the gay/lesbian community over this.
The source code on these models is almost too boring to care about. Training data and weights is what really matters.
These models are trained on human creations with the express intent to drive out those same human creators. There is no social safety net available so those creators can maintain a reasonable living standard without selling their art. It won’t even work–the models aren’t good enough to replace these jobs, but they’re good enough to fool the C-suite into thinking they can–but they’ll do lots of damage in the attempt.
The issues are primarily social, not technical. In a society that judges itself on how well it takes care of the needs of everyone, I would have far less of an issue with it.
Musk doesn’t have Secret Service protection. He doesn’t technically have the title of President.
He does have a private security detail that’s been deputized by the US Marshalls.
Quit your house so you can afford instant coffee.
Democrats in charge despise the progressive wing. They wish they didn’t have to listen to silly little ideas like Medicare for All or building high speed rail. They’ve gotten fat off the idea that we all know what Republicans will do when they get elected and vote for them, anyway.
This was never going to be stable in the long run. Republicans only had to win a few times to entrench themselves. That’s because they don’t see their far right wing as nutjobs. They see them as opportunities for driving things further to the right. For example, it took 50 years of planning to get the right people in the Supreme Court to bury Roe v Wade, and it all happened because they won just enough at the right time and then used that power to get what their base wants. What their base wants is horrible and cruel, but they know how to implement the plan.
Where this leads us now is a situation where ditching establishment Democrats has little downside. We’re fucked if we keep hanging on to them. Drag them to the left or leave them out in the icy cold.
And yet, the Tankies assured me that rare earths were the “real” reason the US was supporting Ukraine all along.
God their reads on situations are horseshit.
That’s not how uncommitted worked. They were focused on the primaries. After Harris was the nominee, they said don’t sit out, don’t vote third party, and don’t vote Trump. They didn’t specifically say to vote Harris, but there’s only one logical outcome left from that combination.