While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.

I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

It’s not so bad once you’ve got your teeth into the problem

assuming you can code, that is

When you have financial engineers overriding the decisions of mechanical engineers, you get crashy airplanes and eventually, caught up murdering people that might talk to investigators in order to defend those juicy profits

…sort of like how when administrators and insurance folk and lawyers and judges override the decisions of doctors and nurses, you end up with highly profitable hospitals and people dying for it

…all a bit like when the bean counters run your software company, layoffs designed to boost stock price by showing investors ‘fiscal discipline’ leaves your engineering teams shorthanded and forces them to de-prioritize bug fixes and dealing with technical debt and rigorous testing and you end up shipping lots of bugs when you release your product

There’s a couple of things at play here:

Where the infra (say it’s the road) isn’t adequately engineered to accommodate cycling and driving at the same time, it’s going to give drivers the experience that the road is a scarce resource and when resources are scarce, some folks are going to think in eliminationist terms (e.g. if those people just didn’t exist, everything would be fine) or the part of their brains that descends from people that wiped out competing clans and took their resources rules the moment and they set about violently defending ‘their’ resources.

The folks most-triggered at being made to share the road with cyclists really do some mental gymnastics to frame it in a way that they’re really the victims here and it’s cyclists, not the road engineering, that are the problem. Oh, poor me those cyclists don’t pay taxes and I subsidize their use of my roads bla bla bla and eventually that comes out in the form of vehicular assault to teach cyclists a lesson to stay off their roads. It’s bullshit all the way down of course, but that way they get to feel like the good guys while still bullying and murdering cyclists.

Also, it’s not by accident that the ‘everything is woke’ people are the first to engage in whatever moral panic that’s directing political violence at today’s boogeyman- whether it’s trans people in bathrooms, or gay people generally, or pregnant women that have ideas about bodily autonomy, their targets are always a tiny vulnerable demographic and uniting to put them in their place is an exercise in maintaining or restoring what they think order ought to look like. If they’re not putting people into the bottom rung of whatever hierarchy they think they’re defending, probably they think it’s the end of order or civilization or the like and they’ve failed in their duties to uphold order. Keeping them agitated about (and acting out about) moral panics is an effective way for lobby groups to pit people against scapegoats to keep their ire focused away from themselves or their patrons.

This is where windfall taxes come back into basic utility. Also it becomes the basis for antitrust action on price collusion if all the sellers coordinate

…you really do need to be specific. Otherwise, it sounds like you’re claiming that “the production processes” (of what, everything? all products in the entire economy?) require PFOAs- and that’s plain bullshit.

Yes, there are some products for which there aren’t equivalent inputs, and you don’t need to be vague and generalize over all of productive everything in the economy in order to make that point- but given the opportunity to be specific, you specified “production of base chemicals that are used in various other follow-up products” and that’s not a straight or specific answer to a direct question.

there is no other material known to withstand the temperatures and pressures needed in the production processes?

Production of what, exactly?

Yes, the downsides of at-large reps would surely be that if no one rep is responsible for particular local issue(s), it’s possible that none would take it up and that would leave some constituencies unrepresented. My thought about that is that when district maps are drawn to purposely divide particular constituencies (I mean, look at all those pack-and-crack maps that split minority groups into districts that mostly elect people that don’t represent them), an at-large system might allow those constituencies to unify around particular at-large reps?
I don’t know, I’m spit-balling here. But thank you for taking up the question constructively!

Ranked Choice Voting? 100% approve.

Get rid of the EC entirely. The popular vote would work quite a bit better as a means of ensuring power is exercised with the consent of the governed.

Scotus and congress both desperately need oversight that is different from ‘we oversee ourselves and find we did nothing wrong’ when obvs. that doesn’t work too well

Tax prep companies… I wish them a prompt and thorough viking funeral.

Fun fact about corporate power at the time of the framers: the colonists felt first-hand the abuse of being effectively governed by crown corporations and shortly after the founding of the USA, corporations were drastically limited in what they could do- for example, they could not engage in politics, they could not own other corporations, could not engage in activities not strictly related to their charters, had charters of finite span, and their charters could be revoked for any violations. If corporations are going to be people today, it’s about damned time we started charging them with crimes when they commit crimes- and yank their charters if they re-offend.

One thing worth questioning: do we really need representative districts? Why not have at-large representatives on a per-state basis, with seats allocated to states/apportioned via census? It would be pretty hard to gerrymander an at-large system, I think

Welp. It’s time for Tesla workers to unionize, and hard

Is there a possible way that both the NYT and OpenAI could lose?

I’d take it today. I’m in my 50s, I’m an endurance athlete (I race bikes) and the calculus looks like: if I wait 20 years I get to experience body-age 50-70 twice, but if I take it now I experience 30-50 twice. Living my prime twice is better than enduring my decline twice, thanks

Ok, that’s fair. The point I wanted to make upthread was that these sorts of impossible things are regularly made to work when making it work is worthwhile. Most of the ‘but this is a limitation of the technology’ talk here (about how EVs can’t work in the cold, etc) is defeatist bullshit that ignores that really if you want it to work it can be made to work

The main thing is that electric is the same way,

No, the larger point is that it’s a struggle to make diesel work at +20F if you don’t do the things to make it work, and yet these things can be made to work reliably at -50F. The obstacle isn’t the limitations of the technology, it’s whether or not the cost curve makes sense. Electric can be made to work cheaply, if it’s important to you that it work- just like it’s possible to make that diesel turn over at -50F

I grew up and rode the bus to school in Iowa.

I rode the bus in Alaska. The buses ran well below -50f. It turns out that it’s not that hard to keep your batteries and oilpans heated if you bother putting plug-in heaters (literally, electric blankets for the purpose) in your fleet vehicles, winterize your vehicles, and plug them in when it’s cold.

I get that it’s uncommon to be that cold-prepared in places that don’t expect to see temperatures below -20 for more than a few days in a given calendar year- at some point, it makes sense to just call it off when it’s that cold. After all, do all (or even most of) the kids have proper clothes to deal with real cold?

Really cold weather can be adapted to, it’s just that when you don’t need it that often it makes sense not to spend the resources doing it.

"We’re tracking you for your privacy 🙄

For those of you who haven’t been in a school bus in years, do you remember how loud they are? Reducing diesel pollution is a win, but being in a less-noisy environment for however long each day is also a win.

As a cyclist and occasional user of public transit, I really like the idea of most buses eventually being at least plug-in hybrid-electric if not entirely battery electric. I’m curious about the mass difference between a diesel, diesel-electric, and battery-electric bus (after all, the heavier the vehicle, the harder it is on the road). I expect some of the fuel-and-maintenance-cost-savings from the bus fleet will have to go to road maintenance in the end, but I’d rather spend money that way (locally) than spend it on pumping fresh hot carbon out of foreign wellheads

Simple jinx should cause most firearms to fail or jam In a universe where guns exist and level-1 wizards can cast magic missile/fireball and cantrips like firebolt, setting fire to things (like gunpowder), my bet is that low-level magic users aren’t going to be trumped by steampunk-grade tech that easily

What seems to be going down is that tech firms are laying off AI teams that aren’t based on large LLMs like ChatGPT. My read: they’re thinking it’s time to lay off those workers in anticipation of replacing that functionality (in siri, cortana, echo/alexa) with a large LLM stack

That means its working