Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)D
Posts
0
Comments
347
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • It's not racism. It's just that sysadmins are goths who prefer dark mode, and were esthetically aggravated by the discordant terminology.

  • Because right-wing propaganda is "become Nazis, the left are all sub-humans" and the left wing propaganda is "what the fuck, the right are all Nazis!?"

    It's hard to spot propaganda when it's just the truth spoken loudly.

  • A mere casual endorsement is not an appeal to authority. If you don't like the guy that's fine, but it's not a logical fallacy to, for example, describe a late night comedian as "a kinda funny guy.". (A logical fallacy would require that someone assume Krugman is RIGHT because of his record, not that he's merely worth reading )

    How is dismissing someone because of where they worked NOT an ad hominem attack?

    How is splitting hairs over which awards given by the swedish government are and aren't "nobel prizes" NOT a distinction without a difference?

  • You didnt attack any of his actual credentials, though. You just said that he should be dismissed because he wrote for a particular newspaper and the award he was given by the Swiss government was not one of the awards given by the Swiss government funded by the gift of a 19th century arms merchant.

    If you want to rebut my statement that Krugman "has a pretty good track record", please do so! But you didn't, and haven't, and instead asserted your own biases as fact.

    Which is obviously your right to do but, again, is a really weird response to a "who is this guy" post.

  • Go read the actual text of the US Constitution . The answer is a quirky technical "well, theoretically yes but practically no."

    https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-2/section-2/clause-1/

    The President ... shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

    That last emphasized line means that if the US Congress were to impeach and remove a president for bribery or a criminal conspiracy, they could also negate any pardons given to POTUS's collaborators.

    Of course, since no US President has ever been removed from office by congress's impeachment power, and it's uncertain if a post-term impeachment and conviction would itself pass the inevitable SCOTUS appeal, this is even less likely than the US Congress awarding a no-majoroty electoral collage vote to the other major party.

  • But we're always trying to increase revenue and decrease cost. That's biological. It's a constant.

    You may have this habit, but it's hardly universal to our species. My biology tells me to value the stability of home life and the predictability of patterns; any increase in revenue or reduction in costs is from learned habits or intentional action.

    I completely agree about personal discipline being a good bulwark against accidental change for the worse, though.

  • I don't think it's often useful to react to contrary evidence as special case exceptions.

    The "tragedy of the commons" is a real thing, but it's also literally what "the cathedral and the bazar" is about. I would argue that the awareness and intentional action made based on either side of this mode is why technology seems to behave differently from other areas of human society.

    Generalizing from the specific, I think it's more helpful to say "things tend to change randomly over time, and people can be resistant to sudden change which is not obviously better."

    Since random change is more likely to be a change for the worse than a change for the better, societies will have a tendency to slowly become worse as time goes on. But the worse something gets the easier it is for people to discard it, and since intentional changes for the better are so often deliberate they also are often improvements to the best of what came before.

    Enshittification occurs more as a deliberate act to increase revenue or decrease cost, which is a whole different ball game.

  • An ad hominum attack and a distinction without a difference is a hell of a response to "who is this guy".

    Do you want to show the class where on your wallet the Keynesian model of economics touched you? (Or do you perhaps have a "Krugman sucks and you shouldn't listen to him" link you'd like to share?)

  • People making things worse isn't a natural state.

    To give an example off the top of my head, the US House of Representatives used to be even worse. An interpretation of the Constitution's quorum clause became traditional in that if a rep would not answer "present" when called to a vote they were counted as not in attendance. Essentially, a minority faction gave themselves a veto on the whole body. This persisted for decades until one speaker just said "I can see you there", and the body got slightly better.

    (That it was latter became bad all over again in new and clever ways is a slightly different issue.)

  • Asserting that the vast majority of people don't think is about as bold a statement of bigotry as you can make.

    Most thoughts are boring, trite, and unoriginal. A small minority of us have the training, resources, and reputation to translate their thoughts into textbooks and policies and institutes, but the thoughts they have aren't in general any higher quality than the rest of the species.

    I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

    https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould

  • Paul Krugman is a nobel-prize winning economist who used to have a column in the NY Times. He has a relatively impressive record of predicting terrible things.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman

    And while I certainly don't want to push back on the difference between heroin and other opium derivatives, it's worth noting that legally speaking they're both exactly as illegal when not used as prescribed for the treatment of pain or disease.

    It's not a blog post about heroin or opiates, though, so quibbling over the imperfections of his analogy is kinda missing the point. Please give it another read if you have a few minutes; the analogy is fairly apt, though very depressing as an American.

  • I'm glad you took it in the spirit it was intended. (Slightly chiding, but well-meaning.)

    I think it can be really hard to not pass on our bad habits to our kids. Mine have a room just as messy as mine ever was, and they're at least as bad at doing their homework as I ever was.

    Good job so far!

  • But neither wants to eat them.

    Respectfully, if neither of your children have a vegetable* dish they will eat as a snack you haven't exposed them to a wide enough array of vegetables and vegetables preparation methods.

    Don't be afraid to add salt, roast instead of boil, or just experiment with things you haven't tried.

    (*: And "vegetable" here is strictly in a culinary context, excluding grains and near-grains like potatoes and including savory sead-bearing plant-parts like cucumbers. But if they don't even like a form of potato or a grain, you may have a eating disorder on your hand...)

  • No, because that's already the constitutional quorum. You could alter or abandon the cloture rule, however.

    Changing Senate rules can be done as a simple act of the Senate, with a simple majority of the senators who show up voting in the affirmative (and VPOTUS casting a tiebreaker.)

    Don't hold your breath, however. Unless the 2026 blue wave results in 70 democratic senators who can remove trump after impeachment, the incentive to radically change anything is dramatically reduced.

  • Like the other dude said, if your only argument is "OMG, everybody knows that corporations are evil, they must be selling poison", that doesn't rise to the level of obvious.

    It's like saying that since the US federal government in the 60s was racist and transphobic, they must have faked the moon landing.

    If it were "obvious" that a sugar substitute was dangerous, the sugar companies would have trumpeted that as loudly as they could.

  • do you really need to resort to baseless ad hominems for your argument?

    It wasn't an ad hominem attack. It was a genuine statement of fraternal love, as Jesus taught His followers to strive for.

  • You don't have a "claim", you have an anti-christian (and anti-relgious) bias I suspect I couldn't talk you out of with a time-travelling phone box and a univerally-translating fish.

    I hope whatever hurt you can't hurt you anymore, and that you find love and joy in your life.

  • Value for resources is also highly subjective.

    If I have zero water and $50, but you have 50 waters and $0, I would value one of your waters more than one of my dollars and you would value one of my dollars more than one of your waters. And so we would trade, and both be happier for it.

  • Science is not a search for truth. It's a search for provable falsehoods and useful theories.