jhp123

I'm not going to be kind to those who carry water for Nazis. But this is a good reminder to step away from HN, thanks. I'll stop commenting.

name one moderate person who protested at the unite the right rally. You say there is ample evidence. Name one.

You don't seem to know much about this event. There were no moderates. To quote your own link from above: "virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong."

It's not logic we're talking about, but rhetoric. Trump wasn't making a syllogism. When you say that you condemn some group, but then you follow it up with praise for that same group and justification for their actions, it's not a genuine condemnation. It's like the famous speech in Julius Caesar, "I come not to praise Caesar..." but he was in fact praising Caesar. Or for a more modern example, "I ain't saying she's a gold digger..." actually makes the point that she is a gold digger.

> You say they were "a group of racists, anti-semites, KKK and neo-Nazis", but not all of them were racists, not all of them were anti-Semites, not all of them were KKK members, and not all of them were neo-Nazis.

Yes they were! it was a far right rally organized literally by neo-Nazis and the KKK. You're rewriting history to make the same point Trump did: that the fascist violence of the Unite the Right rally wasn't a political act attributable to the entire group of protestors, it was an exceptional act attributable only to a few of the attendees, and most of the attendees were "fine people".

Again, it's false. It's a lie. There were no moderates marching with the Nazis and KKK. You and Trump are lying to excuse a violent fascist group of a murder they committed.

of course he was talking about the "Unite the Right" protestors. The violence occurred at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, what other "side" could he possibly have been referring to?

The articles you linked actually confirm my point, did you mean to link something else?

As Snopes and politifact confirms, Trump made the following statement about the "Unite the Right" protestors, a group of racists, anti-semites, KKK and neo-Nazis who had staged a violent rally followed by a vehicular murder: "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides".

Please take a look at the transcript in its entirety. Shortly after the part where he says Nazis should be condemned, he goes on to say that there are "fine people on both sides", undercutting his earlier claim.

You don't seem to understand why the "very fine people" remark was unacceptable to many of us. Like I said, he was excusing political violence. A woman had been murdered by neo-Nazis and he went out of his way to minimize, justify and excuse the act, while condemning imaginary "alt-left" violence at the same event.

On the topic of Sicknick, I don't find it credible that he died coincidentally the day after being assaulted. The timing alone is strong evidence that the two are related.

Even if it was "merely" an assault on a police officer, it's political violence and it's acceptable to every Republican voter. You opened this door.

when right wingers killed Heather Heyer, Trump called them "very fine people". When they killed Brian Sicknick, he called them heroes and pardoned them. If even 10 percent of the right had drawn a line against political violence after Jan 6 then we wouldn't be here today. They all embraced it when it was their side. Charlie himself chartered the buses and obstructed the resulting investigation.

Rabin and Abe seem to be examples where the assassin more or less got what they wanted (derail the peace process and damage the Unification Church respectively)

if the debt ever causes actual problems, e.g. we can't sell our treasury bonds, then our politicians will suddenly remember how to tax rich people.

In the mean time the impossible, unsustainable, terrifying national debt will be used to justify benefit cuts (like the upcoming privatization/cut of social security when the trust fund runs out in 7 years)

there are many indirect effects. Imagine a factory employing 80 low-wage "takers" (line workers etc) and 20 high-wage "makers" (managers etc). The owners of the factory make $1 million in profit every month as a taxable dividend. Well if you get rid of the line workers: no more factory, no more managers, no more dividend. This is why honest analyses go beyond simple tax balance accounting.

The other big impact is on price level. When you have an inverted population pyramid, fewer workers need to support more retirees and this shows up as inflation concentrated in labor-intensive industries like healthcare. So even if a program like Medicare really had more tax receipts per beneficiary after reducing immigration, it would also be spending much more per beneficiary under a labor shortage.

Progressive taxation will generally mean that anyone under the median income has a negative net impact on the government's finances. All this study is doing is reflecting the obvious fact that immigrants are by and large working class.

> I don’t even know what to call someone who thinks the government should give private parties discretionary grants and contracts, but shouldn’t be able to use those to influence private actors.

The idea that the sovereign should be limited to follow law, due process, and the advice of experts in the administration of grants goes back at least to the magna carta and is so widespread that you would use a more specific term — a "constitutional monarchist", "republican", "democrat", or "democratic socialist", etc., would all agree on this point. The opposite point of view however, has a name — authoritarian — so you could call such a person "anti-authoritarian".

this is a largely meaningless distinction, immunity covers all the most concerning Presidential misbehavior (i.e. abuse of the powers of the office) while leaving him vulnerable to prosecution for petty personal crimes like getting in a fist fight or something.

I watched the video with surrounding context and it looked like a Nazi salute. Did he ever deny it was a Nazi salute?

we should have talked about it back in 2001 before we sent these young men to risk their lives and health in a misbegotten crusade. The rise in costs for veterans care was predictable: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/02/terror-war-co...

PEPFAR, discussed in the link I posted, is aimed at the HIV epidemic. The HIV epidemic is in fact being solved by the approach of international cooperation and aid: transmission rates are already down by 50% from their peak in the late 90s.

The supply of foreign aid is usually not determined by need but by willingness of the donor countries. So when foreign aid makes progress against one disease or crisis, the money is redirected to the next most pressing issue. This doesn't mean it is useless or is not solving problems.

It is true as a philosophical point that sometimes, an attempt to solve a problem backfires and even worsens the problem. But it is also true that an attempt to solve a problem sometimes solves the problem. You've offered no evidence that foreign aid is ineffective or backfires in any way, just a handwaving story, against the hard quantitative evidence I linked in my comment above.

> Given the enormous amounts of resources the west has poured into the poorest places on earth, when do we see the positive results?

The impact of aid programs is well studied. Here is one of hundreds or thousands of studies showing a measurable positive impact in terms of lives saved: https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/assessi...

> through a neutral lens, it's a clear positive for humanity that these rockets are being developed

Musk's cuts at USAid have caused an ongoing humanitarian crisis and some 300,000 deaths, mostly children[0]. I think if you're coming from a neutral, utilitarian point of view then SpaceX's role in this atrocity outweighs any realistic estimate of benefit to humanity.

[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...

the test asks for a very significant amount of work, and makes it clear that they are looking for more effort than the minimum ("Do the project in a way that shows off your skills as a developer", "see what kind of extra features you can come up with").

Asking candidates to put in disproportionate amounts of time and effort is abusive. The hiring manager here seems to have taken all of 5 minutes to reject the candidate's multiple hours of work.

edit: commenters here are also missing the forest for the trees. If the candidate had done X, Y, Z to make a more compelling entry then it would be some other poor guy staring at a two line rejection of tens of hours of work. The process is exploitative.

How did manufacturing adjust to the rise of 3d printing and the new world where 90% of consumer goods were printed at home, replicator-style?

How did the finance world adjust to a world where financial transactions were automated on the blockchain using smart contracts?

How have cities adapted to the massive migration of in-person experiences to the metaverse — and so soon after they rebuilt all their physical infrastructure around the revolutionary personal transportation system known as the Segway[0]?

[0] none other than Steve Jobs predicted that cities would be designed around the Segway https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/04/engineering.hi...

I'm not the first one to see parallels to the Cultural Revolution. Policies like purging the intelligentsia and sending educated urban people to go work in the fields weren't motivated by any thought out plan, but by an irrational sense of resentment against "elites" and a desire for "purity".

The premise of DOGE is accountability to the personal whims and judgments of Elon Musk ... when we talk about accountability in government we usually mean, accountability to the public

Sept 2024 was when OpenAI announced its new model - not an LLM but a "chain of thought" model built on LLMs. This represented a turn away from the "scale is all you need to reach AGI" idea by its top proponent.

The thing about AI is that it doesn't work, you can't build on top of it, and it won't get better.

It doesn't work: even for the tiny slice of human work that is so well defined and easily assessed that it is sent out to freelancers on sites like Fiverr, AI mostly can't do it. We've had years to try this now, the lack of any compelling AI work is proof that it can't be done with current technology.

You can't build on top of it: unlike foundational technologies like the internet, AI can only be used to build one product, a chatbot. The output of an AI is natural language and it's not reliable. How are you going to meaningfully process that output? The only computer system that can process natural language is an AI, so all you can do is feed one AI into another. And how do you assess accuracy? Again, your only tool is an AI, so your only option is to ask AI 2 if AI 1 is hallucinating, and AI 2 will happily hallucinate its own answer. It's like The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Cat E trying to clean up the mess Cat D made trying to clean up the mess Cat C made and so on.

And it won't get any better. LLMs can't meaningfully assess their training data, they are statistical constructions. We've already squeezed about all we can from the training corpora we have, more GPUs and parameters won't make a meaningful difference. We've succeeded at creating a near-perfect statistical model of wikipedia and reddit and so on, it's just not very useful even if it is endlessly amusing for some people.

I wouldn't think you need any deep insight or analysis to understand that a media site privately held by a government official is propaganda

> no amount of discussion is going to change their minds

It's a slow process. A MAGA extremist isn't going to read "LGBT rights are human rights!" and say "Ah, I didn't realize! Of course!" and become a liberal.

Maybe they argue with someone about how tariffs are going to be great for the country, and they don't change their mind. But a few months later their neighbor in trucking loses their job, and their friend in construction is talking about how hard it is now, and they start to have a few doubts. They think back to how the guy they were arguing with said this would happen.

And then they argue with someone that only illegal aliens are going to be deported, and they don't change their mind. But then when US citizens start being sent to the camps, they remember that they thought this wouldn't happen and even argued against it.

People do change their mind eventually. Even violent fanatics have changed their minds: the Maoist Red Guards lost steam, the IRA followed a peace process as did FARC in Colombia. If you love liberty, democracy, peace, and prosperity, then I think your best move is to persist in trying to convince MAGA extremists, while understanding that it will take a long time and potentially a lot of chaos and conflict.

the money is for research not education.

A lot of modern industry started as academic research. Things like semiconductors, EUV lithography, mRNA vaccines, or AI originate in government-funded academic research.

The health effects of smoking and leaded gas were established by academic research, allowing government programs to massively improve our collective health.

Climate change has been recognized, diagnosed, and its solutions invented mostly by academic researchers, an effort that may save all industrial civilization.