See what happens when you don’t comply in advance?

I assume he doesn’t wipe for the same reasons.

“You don’t have to worry personally because I’m sending u somewhere beyond extradition,” wrote back the responder believed to be Bannon less than two minutes later.

Epstein died about 7 months later. It takes on a sinister tone in retrospect, but given the amount of time between the two events, I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.

Software development has the advantage of happening in an environment where the cost of failure is relatively low. A bad change might be caught by the test suite before it ever sees production. If it does get to production, there might be consequences, but not the kind that typically kills people.

In fact, I think software engineering in general should lean into this idea on most things. Don’t try to ignore failure, but catch failure as fast as possible. Things like medical devices and aeronautic software should continue using formal verification methods, but the rest of us should iterate fast.

Iterating fast doesn’t work for other things. I’m a programmer by trade, but I have enough electrical knowledge that I once took up a contract for designing a PCB. I tried to do the “one thing at a time” approach, and it just doesn’t work very well there. Non-trivial PCBs will have errors in them the first few times you try them, and you’ll need to go back for a redesign. In software, that potentially takes minutes or even seconds. But in PCBs, you have to order out to a company to make them and wait at least a week for them to turn it around. Even if you have equipment to do it yourself, it still takes hours. You just have to batch up your changes. (Electrical simulators can potentially help with this, though.)

In government, the effects of policy could take years or even decades to work out. Single change at a time would be a stranglehold on the ability to fix problems.

It does in an indirect way due to having more parties.

Let’s say you have $1M to try to buy off some politicians with campaign funds. If there are only two viable candidates, you give $500k to both. Now you’ve bought both parties and can win no matter the outcome.

If there are three or four or five parties, though, you have to guess who is going to win. You can’t split it up that many times and still have much influence on the politicians in question. Your funds can be easily swamped out by grassroots groups. Your guess based on polling can also end up being dead wrong when some party makes a sudden surge in the final weeks.

That said, it’d still be better if we ditched Citizens United and publicly funded elections.

You’re not supposed to try to reproduce the Stanford prison experiment.

Our long nightmare of commodity hardware and open ecosystems is finally coming to an end!

From the comments during the trial, he may very well lose this one.

The trouble is that conservatives hate taxes, and the old ones are just smart enough to know that tariffs are just another way of taxing things. If you go back through Project 2025, you’ll find two opinions on them. One took the libertarian view that tariffs are bad, period. The other took the protectionism view that some tariffs were necessary in order to beat China. Neither wanted such gigantic, across the board tariffs.

The old conservatives on the court were making some very skeptical questions of the Administration lawyers, and didn’t seem to be buying the answers. We’ll see what happens when the ruling comes out, but that sort of thing is a pretty reliable signal of where they’re going to land.

All that said, what’s going to happen is that after prices to average people rose due to tariffs, the payback will go to the companies that imported things, and they’ll pocket the money.

. . . the fundamental ideas about rates of change seem like they’re something that everyone human deserves to be exposed to.

People understand the idea of instantaneous speed intuitively. The trouble is giving it a rigorous mathematical foundation, and that’s what calculus does. Take away the rigor, and you can teach the basic ideas to anyone with some exposure to algebra. 6th grade, maybe earlier. It’s not particularly remarkable or even that useful for most people.

When you go into a college major that requires calculus, they tend to make you take it all over again no matter if you took it in high school or not.

Probability and statistics are far more important. We run into them constantly in daily life, and most people do not have a firm grounding in them.

You mean the AI slop that is the entire post?

It’s not a bribe if you do paperwork.

(Joking, but not really. It’s impressive how much shit you can get away with if you file the paperwork.)

Just for context, the US uses around 7 billion barrels per year. Can keep the SUVs going for the better part of a century.

Funny, I was just reading about this sort of thing in “How to blow up a pipeline”. It’s the sort of argument that seems obvious in retrospect.

When someone in the global south uses a coal stove to cook their food, they’re doing it by necessity. When a billionaire sails out on a mega yacht, it’s pure excess. Yeah, banning them won’t make the difference between 1.5C and 2.0C of global warming, but it’s low hanging fruit.

We can also ban private jets, and the only significant impact to the economy would be that some billionaires have to travel around in first class like some kind of lowly multimillionaire or upgraded plebian.

It does not matter if you think Valve makes good products or not.

My worry now is that the American working class hasn’t learned how powerful it could be, and liberal capitalism will reassert itself with slightly more social safety net. At the very least, we should end up with European style social democracy, and even that seems like a low bar.

Rats know which way to run on a sinking ship.

I wouldn’t automatically assume everything was consentual. Not considering the source. Things like “lost a bet” are on the table.

I don’t think that’s true. The only two examples of a woman trying to run for President have been against the same cult leader. He didn’t even get the popular vote the first time (which a lot of people seem to conveniently forget), and he barely won it in the second example.

The vast majority of America would be generically fine with a woman as President, even if they don’t vote for her. The only thing lacking is a cult-like draw, and that’s not something you should aspire to.

Let’s just take the W on this one, ok?

Waiting to be Gerald Ford.

Morally, yes. Legally, it’s going back to the companies, and they’ll pocket the money and walk away.